The pandemic period of self-isolation has forced me to pay attention to birds I do not usually give a second glance – house sparrows.
Peering out of the window, watching the cheeky sparrows squabbling on the garden lawn one autumnal afternoon, I suddenly realised I had never determined what sparrows actually eat, beyond their cadging crumbs inside and outside Banjo’s bakery in Salamanca Square.
I have written in the past of the smart, crafty sparrows working out how the Banjo’s automatic doors function. They know that people approaching the doors will cause them to open, and the sparrows wait close by to make a dash for the spilled crumbs inside.
Only in recent months, with no one sitting at the tables inside the bakery, crumbs have been in short supply, and doors have not been opening so regularly.
The sparrows I watch at home always seem to find food, even if I do not make a habit of feeding them breadcrumbs as people often do. The most they get from me is leftover rice, which they seem to enjoy.
The sparrows might be our most familiar and enigmatic garden bird but there is still so much we do not know about them. Not just in Australia, but Britain from where our sparrows originated, introduced by Poms feeling homesick for the mother country.
Many introduced species have done much harm to the Australian environment but by and large the sparrows have not created problems on the scale of another familiar introduced bird, the wide-ranging starling. The sparrows generally remain in suburban areas and fill a niche not occupied by native birds. They are seed-eaters and there is only one of these in Tasmania, the firetail finch.
The last time I looked closely at my garden sparrows was in 2002, the year they went on the Red Data list of endangered birds. Populations had collapsed in European cities, where pollution from increasing motor traffic – especially diesel fuel – was found to be poisoning the insects on which sparrow young feed. The nestlings and fledglings are fed insects to give them protein.
The gentrification of European cities was also robbing sparrows of nesting sites in the cavities of old and abandoned buildings.
Here in Tasmania, sparrow numbers collapsed for a different reason. A virus – a type of bird flu– spread through the population but luckily it only affected sparrows and not native species.
The virus died out eventually and the neighbourhood sparrows were soon back to their previous numbers.
Just beyond my bedroom window I hear their song rising to a dawn chorus shortly after first light, although the “song” is nothing more than an exclamation mark – a cheep, a chirp, a chirrup.
Throughout the seasons the noisy, feisty clan that make my garden their home are a tornado of rapid flight, coming and going to both native and introduced vegetation, fossicking across my lawn. But what do they eat? Seeds, moss, tiny insects? I can never tell.