In a Cheshire Garden: Natural History Notes

by Geoffrey Egerton-Warburton

My wife told me one morning in October, 1910, that she had seen on a tree near her window a thick-set bird with a big head and short tail and neck, whose colour she described as some shades of brown. Two or three little birds appeared to be mobbing it, and it kept pecking at them like a parrot. She only saw it for a minute or two, before it flew away round the corner of the house. It altogether sounds as though it might have been a hawfinch.

House-sparrows abound here, and are interesting and amusing to the unprejudiced looker-on who doesn't suffer from their depredations. There is no denying that sparrows are vulgar, and bold and pushing, or that they are tiresomely persevering in the mischief that they do. They are coarsely built and have no song, while their monotonous chirp is distracting, but they have that which for the race of life stands them in more stead than either beauty or musical talent; they have courage and intelligence, a wonderful power of adapting themselves to circumstances and a sound healthy constitution, with a digestion that an ostrich might envy.

The food-stand has shown me what sparrows are and what they can do. When I set it up I had no wish to feed sparrows, and could not bear to see them devouring all before them in the greedy, systematic way that they have. So I set my wits to work to see if I could not contrive something by which they might be baffled without depriving the tits of their food. It proved more than I could do to prevent any of the sparrows getting any of the food, but I was able to make it more difficult for them, so difficult that only a few could manage it. They differ very much individually: some are far bolder and more enterprising than others, but I have found that some sparrows can do almost anything that a tit can do in the way of acrobatic performances, though not, of course, with the same easy grace. I tried many devices. I had seen somewhere that if food were suspended from a pliable twig only tits would venture to attack it. It didn't take long to prove the fallacy of this idea. The swinging of the net made not the slightest difference to the sparrows; they alighted on it just as readily as if it had been lying on the ground. Then I tried hanging the net at one end of a stick and a movable weight at the other. The stick acted as a balance, and the net went down directly a bird settled on it. This instability frightened the sparrows for a long time, but in the end they got quite used to it. It was the same with many other contrivances that I tried, they answered their purpose for a time, it may be altogether as far as most went, but in every case sooner or later some sparrows learnt to overcome every difficulty, and it struck me that each successive year they seemed to do so more easily, as though they turned the experience of one year to good account in the next.

In 1899 I made an apparatus like a windmill, with four arms, and food in a kind of little box at the end of each. The arms, of course, went down directly a bird touched them. This for a long time was effectual, and I had begun to flatter myself that I had solved the problem, but during a hard frost some one or two sparrows overcame their fears and managed to get the fat, and when once they saw it might be done with safety many others learnt the trick. I then complicated the idea into a wheel, with eight arms, and food only at the extreme point of each. This answered so far that no sparrow seemed able to get at the fat from the revolving arm itself as they hung on to it (an easy feat for the tits), but they used to hover opposite the ends of the arms and pick out the food. (Robins did this also.) Independently of its effect in discouraging the sparrows, the wheel afforded much amusement by the antics it imposed upon the tits as they went round and up and down on the arms.

One plan I tried depended for its action on the difference of weight between a sparrow and a tit. It was the opposite of the arrangement by which sparrows are prevented from appropriating the food put out for pheasants, where the pheasant opens the corn-box by his weight on the perch outside. I tried so to arrange the balance that the heavier sparrow was cut off from the hole which contained the food, whilst for the tit it remained open. The practical drawback to this plan was the nicety of adjustment required, for though a sparrow is more than twice the weight of a tom-tit, the difference between the two weights is little more than a quarter of an ounce.

One of the most successful contrivances, after all, is one of the simplest. Take a tin canister (one that I used was three inches long by 2-1/2 in diameter), hang it open end downwards by a string brought through a hole in the other end, to this string fasten inside the tin a bit of wood about the thickness of a large pencil, and let it hang like the clapper in a bell, projecting a quarter of an inch below the bottom rim of the tin. Plaster all round the inside of the tin with fat, leaving the wooden tongue in the middle free for the birds to cling to. In this way both great-tits and tom-tits can feed themselves without difficulty, but only one sparrow in twenty can manage with much ado to hold on and to eat at the same time. (To see a sparrow with his less-practised feet clinging to the edge of the tin, back downwards, just like a tit and helping himself to its contents is a good example of the energetic enterprise and the adaptability of his nature.) Robins do sometimes hold on to the tin in the same way, but generally they get quite as much as they want by flying up and pecking at the fat. They seem able to aim very accurately, and when the tin is nearly empty can make sure of the smallest fragments. Sparrows also attack the food in the same way by flying up at it, but they seem to find it more awkward, owing, perhaps, to the small space between the sides of the tin and the wood in the middle, which barely gives room for their larger heads and clumsier beaks.

Another successful plan was to suspend the fat within a roll of inch-mesh wire netting. To begin with I put this on the food-stand, at some little distance from my window, and though at first only tits and robins would venture down within the roll of wire, after a time the sparrows followed suit, and, of course, there was nothing to prevent them getting as much as they liked but their own caution. I might have stopped them by covering the top with netting, but then the great-tits and robins would have been excluded as well as the sparrows, and even tom-tits could only get through the meshes with difficulty. However, I moved the roll quite close up to the glass of the window, leaving the top still uncovered (and the bottom closed) as before. Tom-tits came to it in its new position almost as readily as when on the food-stand. Great-tits came but were always rather uneasy about it, but not one sparrow ventured to clamber down inside the roll, although it was there for more than a year and we had some very hard frosts. They would continually try to get at the food from underneath and from the side, but could not make up their minds to go inside the roll itself, although it was quite open and they had learnt to go in without scruple when it was on the food-stand, before it was put close to the window. The most fearless of any birds with regard to this wire roll were two robins in the beginning of 1902; they were perpetually scrambling up and down inside the wire, and continued to do so until April, when the supply of food came to end.

The extreme caution of sparrows enables one to scare them away for a time by a fluttering ribbon or a bit of paper, but it is only for a time; when they see that tits treat such things with contempt and venture close to them with impunity they soon summon up courage to lay aside their suspicions.