Where have all the sparrows gone?

It’s quiet in the garden today. Normally the air is filled with the sound of chirruping house sparrows, who take it in turns to drink from the pond or squabble over the feeders when they think I’m not looking. They fly over my head quickly and cautiously, their wings a wet dog shaking the sea off its coat, a deck of cards being flicked before a game: DUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRP.

But today they are gone.

Yesterday the garden next door was razed in preparation for paving. The large buddleia, in which the sparrows roosted, hid, bred and chatted, was destroyed. Another garden lost beneath paving stones.

The sparrows were the first species I noticed when I viewed the flat 18 months ago, and it had taken a while to lure them in. I wanted to turn my garden into a wildlife haven for birds and other animals, so after I took up the decking in my garden I planted shrubs and climbers, hung feeders and erected nest boxes. I made a shelf in my pond so they could drink and bathe easily. Yet still all was quiet. I would watch them fly from the holly bush in the garden at the end to the left, to the buddleia next door on the right. Me in the middle. Once my shrubs and trees were mature, the birds would have three whole gardens in a row – a mini wildlife corridor if you like – in which to shelter. Until then they would continue to ignore me, and the other tree-less, shelter-less “gardens”.

They eventually started coming when I changed the seed in my feeder, and for the next three months they ate me out of house and home. I didn’t mind. I would fashion a little hide using deckchairs and cushions, and watch as they gathered on the wall, craning their necks all around them, before the bravest would sail in to drink or eat or simply look around, and another 30 would follow. CHEEP! They made me laugh.

Now it’s quiet, but they won’t be far away. The house sparrow is a stay-at-home sort of a bird, living in extended family groups in small territories; it’s not very adventurous. But that’s its downfall: when the food and shelter in its territory are removed, these family groups struggle. They tend to stick around, rather than move on. So gradually, locally, they die out. Garden habitats are being lost at a tremendous rate in our towns and cities — a hedge is grubbed out here, a drive or garden paved there, a “garden-office” built somewhere else. And our noisy, brown, stay-at-home house sparrow is disappearing too – according to the RSPB, London lost 60% of its sparrows between 1994 and 2004, and it’s a similar picture in other urban areas.

House sparrows have simple habits: they take shelter in large shrubby plants in which they can make a lot of noise but not be seen; they’re seed eaters but feed insects to their young; they live and nest in loose colonies, often in the eaves and roof cavities of houses. That’s it. To survive they need large hedges or shrubs, long grass and unclipped and untended patches of land (better for insects and therefore their predators), and somewhere to nest. But you rarely find these habitats in urban gardens, especially small ones, like mine and next door’s. The house sparrow is suffering for our modern tidy ways, for our penchants for a second or third car, for working from home, for not liking birds in the roof, for the lack of time or inclination to have outside space, for the halving or paving of gardens when a house is divided into flats. In rural areas they suffer different types of habitat loss, plus greater exposure to pesticides and more efficient ways of harvesting and storing seed. But collectively these habitat losses spell disaster: we are changing more quickly than they can.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Buddleia is popular as a nectar source for pollinators, but urban sparrows also use the sprawling shrubs as a refuge. Photograph: DAVID J SLATER / Alamy/Alamy

Despite its popularity among pollinators for nectar, buddleia isn’t such an insect magnet. Its leaves are unused by most moths, leafminers, flies and aphids, whose larvae the house sparrows rely on to feed their chicks. The thing about buddleia is its size and sprawling nature, and its knack of growing in otherwise barren urban areas: cracks in walls, chimneys and other out-of-reach places. Introduced from China and Japan by the Victorians, it has caused problems in the wild because it out-competes native plants that provide much better overall habitats for insects (and therefore, ironically, house sparrows), but it’s a welcome refuge in cities.

Here, in Brighton, next door’s buddleia was the only shrub along a long stretch of paved over or boringly lawned gardens, providing shelter for house sparrows. It wasn’t the best habitat, but it was better than nothing. And now – in the immediate gardens around me at least – they have nothing.

In theory, the plants I’m growing are better for house sparrows than buddleia. There’s wild honeysuckle, apple, guelder rose and spindle, two climbing roses and a couple of seed-bearing clematis. When lush and mature they will provide shelter and attract egg-laying insects, whose larvae the house sparrows can feed to their young. But it will take time for them to grow, and it’s futile if every other garden around me is paved. I can’t help but feel the house sparrow in this neck of the woods is doomed.

• Kate Bradbury gardens on a small patch of land in Brighton. She is the author of The Wildlife Gardener. Read the previous posts in this series here.