It’s unlikely that birds of prey have anything to do with the decline in garden songbirds, says Rod Liddle, and anyway, what right have we got to play God with wildlife?
But oh! The crewel sparrer’hawk
E spies im in is snuggery,
E sharpens up is bleedin’ claws
An rips im aht by thuggery
anon, 19th c.
There was a fearful commotion outside, in the garden, a screeching and frantic flapping, the sound of water being urgently displaced, of aggression and terror. I rushed to the door and looked through the glass; three feet away from me, in my daughter’s half-collapsed paddling pool — replete with winter snow-melt and rain — a wood pigeon was getting its head kicked in. The pigeon had its head down, as if it were ashamed, the beak inclined gently towards its breast; it offered no opposition to the assault, save for the sort of passive resistance nonsense pacifists used to urge upon us; wings by its side, knowing that it was morally in the right, and being killed.
The creature doing the killing hacked away frantically with its sharp beak and talons and then, as I stood by the door, suddenly stopped its murder and fixed me with two bright, nasty, f***-you yellow eyes, as if to say; ‘yeah, so what, mate — your point is?’ I felt embarrassed and briefly looked away, much as if I had blundered into a public convenience and witnessed a senior member of the Church of England performing an act of oral love upon a policeman. One knows that this sort of thing goes on, one simply does not wish to witness it. When I looked back, the aggressor had flown off, and the pigeon was paddling broken and hopeless in the pool, next to a plastic figurine model of Peppa Pig, usually pink and white but now flecked with crimson.
I thought at first, in my overexcitement, that it had been a young goshawk, although I could not explain to myself what a goshawk was doing in a Wiltshire garden. Maybe it was on holiday, bored of those endless northern forests and a diet of game. Common sense then kicked in and I realised it was our smartest and least heralded bird of prey, the sparrowhawk; a bird demeaned by its nominal, if wholly inaccurate, choice of prey. They don’t eat many sparrows; in the main they eat blue tits and great tits, flying low and at great speed through our dwindling, lovely remnants of broad-leafed woodland, dodging the trees like those spacecraft from Star Wars, usually mistaken at a distance for a cuckoo, sharp, swift and lethal. I had only ever seen them on the wing before.
Sparrowhawks had a bad time of it from the 1950s to the 1980s, their numbers reduced as a consequence of cyclodiene insecticides used by farmers on grain and which were consequently eaten by the sparrowhawks’ prey. Now, though, they are in the dock themselves, accused of having had a hand in the precipitous decline in what are known to the public as ‘songbirds’ in recent years. Songbirds are, popularly, small birds which, for the most part, are incapable of carrying a tune anything more complex than ‘Three Blind Mice’, and even that is pushing it for a greenfinch, which is capable only of making the sort of noise which Harriet Harman might make if you were to put her in a deep pit with some poisonous snakes; a sort of elongated ‘meiewwwww’, occasionally interspersed with trilling.
The British Trust for Ornithology, however, begs to differ and suggests that several of these ‘songbirds’ may have suffered decline as a consequence of the sparrowhawks’ revival. Once you have fingered your suspect, the next step is to take action against it: soon someone will announce plans for a cull. I just hope the sparrowhawks take advice from legal counsel to the magpies, who were placed in a similar position some years ago, accused of murderous intent towards these harmless ‘songbirds’, and also several counts of theft which were left on file.
It seems pretty clear to me that sparrowhawks are not responsible for the decline of such birds as the bullfinch, tree sparrow etc, even without a scientific study. Indeed, the reverse is probably true; if there is a healthy population of sparrowhawks, then it is likely that there is a healthy population of woodland birds, seeing as sparrowhawks are far more dependent upon their prey than their prey are at risk from sparrowhawks, if you get what I mean; i.e. there needs to be a healthy population of woodland birds for sparrowhawks to prosper, and if the woodland birds don’t prosper then the sparrowhawks die out. Hell, you know, call me Darwin.
The decline in garden songbirds, which are not the usual prey for sparrowhawks, is more likely down to increased human encroachment and, more even than this, that sexually perverted, creeping obscenity, the domestic cat. Now, it is true that I am apt to blame all manner of things — global warming, the earthquake in Haiti, Graham Norton — on domestic cats, creatures which I genuinely detest. But the estimates of how many wild birds, and largely garden birds, are killed each year by cats — around about 100 million — suggest I might be nearer the mark than the British Trust for Ornithology, arrogant though that might seem. The bird charities are always loathe to stick it to Mr Tibbles because they fear estranging all those people who give them vast sums of money every year and also happen to own cats (a paradox which seems to me like donating to Amnesty International while water-boarding Muslims in your basement).
But there is another problem. Our conservationists have it in their heads that all wildlife is subject to our interference, deliberate or otherwise, that there is no such thing as pure, untrammelled nature. This is used, with the best of intentions, to afford carte blanche for conservationists to exterminate species of which they do not approve — such as coypu, or mink, or grey squirrels, or rats, or ruddy ducks, or muntjac — on the grounds that mankind has somehow had a role in allowing them to proliferate. It is scarcely a step forward from the old conservationist argument that all animals were part of God’s — and our — domain and that whilst we should do our best to be nice to them, we were in charge.
The sparrowhawks, I think, would beg to differ. Almost always when we get involved in policing nature, we mess it up and there are ghastly unintended consequences. Let the sparrowhawks pursue their prey with murderous intent.
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