My watch was looking quite disappointing when around 4.30pm, it was overcast and light was fading, out came the sparrows. I counted 17 on my roof who after a chatter flew off to join an even larger gathering. Wonderful.
Rose Cox
Really pleased to hear that they are doing ok in your area.
An optimist sees the beauty of the complete rose.A pessimist sees only the thorn .
Great news, thats an impressive tally! With the right features for them they can thrive, it's the areas where they are not able to find nesting sites, insect food through the summer and seed food through the winter where they are having the most trouble.
Keeping cavities in the roof, putting up nesting boxes, chemical free gardens, a variety of flowering plants, shrubs and trees and of course supplementary food and freshwater will keep your local sparrows happy!
Warden Intern at Otmoor.
Agreed. Plenty of house sparrows in mid Derbyshire. Mind you it costs a small fortune to keep them fed as they eat all the stuff put out to attract other birds - they're even managing to get sunflower hearts out of a feeder with a smaller aperture meant for tits.
When we had the guttering repaired we sited a communual nesting box where the brickwork had been broken, they took to it readily and a good few broods have been raised over the last couple of years.
About 8 years ago I was concerned that in our rural Lancashire location (medium sized village) we had more blue tits then sparrows (3). Put up a couple of boxes and let an Ivy take over a large sycamore in the garden to create some habitat and fed the fledgelings through the summers. Now we have about 30 although only 17 could be bothered to turn up for yesterdays census BGBW. With a few more boxes planned for this year it will be interesting to see how many sparrows the garden will support.
So it does appear that with relatively little effort the sparrows can be given a good helping hand. And this is in spite of the predation of a couple of sparrowhawks requireing cages to be placed around the birdfeeders.
The social habits of sparrows has allowed them to benefit well from my support. I'd like to do something similar with the blackbirds and tits but their terratorial nature limits how many will coexist in my garden. Regards Billm
Not on our garden. While we only managed to count 24 for the birdwatch on really good days we've had upwards of 40, which considering our 'garden' consists of a square of paving, a 2' flower bed and a waist-high hawthorne hedge is a lot of birds in a very small space. Beyond the garden though is a 30 yd wide strip of meadowland, a nature trail and just the other side of that a young (15yr?) planted deciduous woodland. I keep the flowerbed well weeded and sparsly planted, in dry weather it's full of little indentations from the sparrows' dust-baths. :D
I have a colony of maybe 12 or 15 sparrows that spend their days in my privet shrub and conifer hedge. In the spring and summer I am innundated with babies. They are everywhere, boosting my numbers up to about 40. I do have a sparrow terrace up by the eaves but bluetits roost in this from October to March so the sparrows don't get a look in.
In the autumn of 2010 my neighbour cut down his tall conifer tree where they roosted at night, and they dispersed. I barely saw any all that winter but they came back in the spring and are still with me now.
Cheers, Linda.
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I live in a suburban area and I usually see a gang of 7-8 house sparrows in the bushes near my garage, though sometimes there are more than 20. One ot two of them sit on the bird feeder and flick seed onto the floor for their mates! I'm thinking of putting up a box for them but there are a lot of cats round here so not sure I am doing them a favour by encourage them to nest near us.