PUBLISHED: 07:00 01 October
2018
The cockney sparrow could be
making a comeback.
East London used to be a house
sparrow stronghold but annual surveys by the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds (RSPB) found populations crashing year after year from the mid-1970s.
They plummeted by around 70 per
cent at the end of the 1990s.
Since then numbers have
stabilised and there are high hopes they are starting to recover.
Results from the RSPB’s Big
Garden Birdwatch survey, which sees people reporting feathered friends spotted
from their windows, suggests the humble sparrow is gaining in numbers in the
borough.
Urban ecologist Dr Caroline Nash
from the University of East London (UEL) suggested one reason for the drop was
a lack of food with development and modern building design piling pressure on
the species.
“Loft conversions have a lot to
answer for,” Dr Nash said before explaining that sparrows like to nest under
the eaves of houses but noisy human neighbours occupying roof space put them
off.
Recent research suggested air
quality played a role in their decline.
The top five birds in Havering in
descending order after the top placed sparrow are the starling, wood pigeon,
blue tit and blackbird.
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