Sparrow Survey

The Gardens for Wildlife Group is a local initiative that operates in the Lakenham and Town Close areas of Norwich. The group is interested in all aspects of gardening and produces a quarterly newsletter containing articles submitted by its readers. During the spring of 2009 the group asked members of the 1,600 households covered by its circulation to record any house sparrows seen in their gardens and any nests in the last year.

The results of the survey were interesting with no birds being recorded from large well-tended gardens and the majority of records being received from small, relatively unkempt gardens that contained untrimmed hedges and some rough grass areas. Breeding was noted only from those houses that had unlined roof spaces and none from those houses whose roofs have been lined.

These results represent real-life support to theories developed by conservation bodies that the demise of the house sparrow is in part due to modern methods of land use and buildings development; the situation in the suburbs is a mirror image of what is happening in the broader countryside.