Too many sparrows are falling to the ground........

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground but your Father notices it." (Matthew 10.29).

Even the sparrow and the swallow find shelter in your temple (Psalm 84.3)

So the Bible about sparrows, providence and responsible living.

In a world made already much more precarious by the way we hammer and hack the environment into submission to our self-centred goals, sparrows are an ecological smoke detector. So it should give us even more pause for thought that the house sparrow has declined by around 60% in the last decade. Lock block drives, front gardens turned to parking spaces, the popularity of cheap non-native plants, square kilometres of decking, urban pollution reducing botanically based insects, are only some of the reasons.

Don't know about you - but I'm rapidly running out of optimism about our capacity to reverse the damage we do. The whole depressing story about the decline of the house saprrow can be read here.

Meanwhile, John Clare, the finest writer of poetry about birds, lived in such a close rapport with the natural world that he sensed the significant fragility yet irreplaceable wonder of life for each creature. His own remembered experience of mental ill health (his madness, as he called it) made him uniquely qualified as an advocate of compassion and care for those vulnerable and far from insignificant lives that share our planet, and whose interests intersect with our own.
 

Sure my sparrows are my own,
Let ye then my birds alone,
Come poor birds from foes severe
Fearless come, you're welcome here,
My heart yearns at fate like yours,
A sparrow's life's as sweet as ours. 

Comments

[brodie]

Jim - yes turning front gardens into parking areas is a factor as are rear gardens that have more concrete than vegetation. That said another factor in the loss of the sparrow is the resurgence of the sparrow hawk! When I was a kid we used to visit our next door neighbour who was house bound and loved feeding the birds. Her bird table was her joy. However, as well as putting food on the bird table we would also pile balls of wool at her side so she could throw them at the window when the sparrow hawk came in for the kill!

[Jim Gordon]

Not sure about the sparrow hawk resurgence explanation, Brodie. Female sparrow hawks take bigger birds like blackbirds, thrushes etc, and the male takes small birds of which sparrows are only one - finches and tits are other examples. Rather than increase of predator I still think it's the decrease of food source and loss of optimum environment, and with too little time for small birds to adapt.

When I lived on the farms (albeit decades ago) there were flocks of sparrows - now there are far fewer farms, and those that remain are larger with fewer outbuildings suitable for small bird nesting. Increased pesticide use reducing insect populations exacerbate all this. So even in the country, but now in urban environments as well, our passion for tarmac, concrete, combustion engines, insect free zones - och don't get me started again. :-)