'Context' - A Blog
Our 'cockney sparrow', sitting on the scaffolding during the house repairs.
'Cockney Sparrows'
05/03/2021
Why the determination of these little birds draws comparisons with the inhabitants of wartime London.
When we moved to our present house, I was delighted to find once again the presence of sparrows around the place. In our previous home, they had been a relatively unusual sighting, and at the farm I had been working of the last fifteen or so years, they were around, but not in a noticeable way like they had been around the yards and hedges of the dairy farm in the nineties.
As the habitat had seemed similarly suitable in all these locations, I had put my lack of sighting of them down to the reported and rather inexplicable national decline in these birds that I had read has been occurring for some years.
I don’t know why then, that we have them here, but I was pleased. It felt like being re-united with old friends. It seems too, that just like with old friends, my relationship with sparrows is destined to grow deeper and more complex.
In the couple of years we have been here, as well as the constant late winter chatter from them bringing back memories of times and places past, I have witnessed further demonstrations of the determination of these plucky little birds. The first time was to my prolonged consternation and the second time drove me to the edge of distraction over the course of a week.
The previous owner of the house had placed a nestbox under the eaves on a South East facing wall to the house. The box was a few yards from the corner with the South West chimney end of the house.
To set this in context, I need to explain a little about the house: When I say chimney end, I don’t just mean that this end wall has a chimney in it. It is just about all chimney. The fireplace being a 6 foot wide inglenook built of 3 foot thick stone walls, the 12 foot wide chimney structure is most of the end of the house.
Just before we bought the house, a substantial part of this chimney collapsed, leaving us with little choice at the time to move into a house which was a substantial building project. The net result was that the entire end wall of the house had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Furthermore, part of the side walls needed to be dismantled to ‘tie’ the new wall into the old stone wall structure.
To return to the sparrows: the nestbox on the side wall had clearly become occupied by a pair of sparrows, even despite the collapse of the chimney a few yards away over the period in which they must have been building their nest. I can only imagine the sanguine way in which this event must have been discussed in sparrow language at the time.. chip, chirp, cheep...
They shrugged the event off and continued with their nest, while scaffold was erected around the end of the house. This, they seemed to take as intended purely for their benefit, as providing a much more convenient landing platform close to the nest from which they could then flit in one quick move across to it.
The rest of the end wall was dismantled together with the part of the side wall, to within a yard of the nest. The sparrows carried on regardless. Their only concession to the reality around them seemed to be to wait for a moment, to time their ins and outs of the nest if someone was too close. Even this, though, seemed more in the nature of waiting for a gap in the traffic at a busy junction than any great concern about the surrounding activity.
The wall was successfully rebuilt and by the time the bit closest to the nest had been done, the chicks had already fledged. One day I saw a couple of them perched on the convenient scaffolding outside, presumably accepting this as the standard arrangement for a sparrow nest, having never seen any other arrangement.
It is little wonder that the phrase ‘cockney sparrow’ came to have great resonance during the ‘Blitz’ in London during WW2. The same shrugging it off, “we’ll keep going with daily life no matter how impossible it seems” attitude, would seem to apply equally to the defiant spirit of Londoners at the time to the brave little birds on our wall.
The following spring, it was great to notice again the sparrows building in the same box. It seems likely to me that it was the same pair. It was a pleasant anticipation to expect again the cheering chirping to come from outside the window of the room where I paint for the coming year.
To start with I was not disappointed, and enjoyed the springtime chatter coming through the wall. But come May time that year, I was disturbed from my work by a strange tapping sound. After initially disregarding it as a neighbour working with a hammer or something similar, as it continued I realised that it didn’t have the right kind of rhythm for that, and it sounded much closer.
On investigation, I rounded the corner into the back porch to find the male sparrow tapping repeatedly at the window with its beak. When I got close enough to the window, the bird flew off. Walking outside and looking, I could see the bright sun made the window highly reflective. I figured the bird must have seen its own reflection, and viewing it as an interloper in its hard earned territory (which after all it had survived the previous year’s ‘Blitz’ in!), was pecking at it to send it off.
I smiled to myself as witness to a curious incident and returned to my desk, assuming it to be over. Ten minutes later the noise started again; after a minute or so of this, I went through to the porch and the sparrow flew off. Back to work again and ...well, you can see where this is going. It happened over a dozen times that day: if I tried to ignore it, it went on and on and if I went through, the bird flew off, only to return again in a little while...tap..tap..tap..tap..
Then late afternoon it stopped. I guess the sun moved around enough to banish the strength of the reflection. With a sense of relief, the concentration flow returned for the rest of the day’s work. But late morning the following day, he was back hard at it...tap...tap....
I tried many different things that week. I opened one of the two windows, hoping the reflection would thus disappear, but then his activity moved to the adjacent window (which couldn’t open). I hung a sheet up from the fascia above, but the breeze would move it and the bird would find a little corner where the reflection was visible to continue. I tried leaving the interior light on to reduce the reflection. All was to no avail. It went on for most of the week, one little bird determined to defend his territory at the cost of spending most of his day engaged in the fruitless activity of tapping at a window. I wondered too what his mate thought of his activities, did she view it as heroic and selfless defence of the family; or a rather thankless displacement activity to dodge some of the rather more necessary core task of nest building?!
Then it stopped. I was grateful, as it had been hard maintaining concentration on work, and I had a fear that this was to be the shape of the rest of summer. I’ll never know whether the bird decided the reflection was no longer a threat, or if the reflection had changed with the position of the sun in the sky or whether the demands of getting on with a nest simply superseded the value of this task. I had though, once again, witnessed a display of determination of character second to none in one of these tiny nondescript brownish birds, no bigger than my fist.
As the habitat had seemed similarly suitable in all these locations, I had put my lack of sighting of them down to the reported and rather inexplicable national decline in these birds that I had read has been occurring for some years.
I don’t know why then, that we have them here, but I was pleased. It felt like being re-united with old friends. It seems too, that just like with old friends, my relationship with sparrows is destined to grow deeper and more complex.
In the couple of years we have been here, as well as the constant late winter chatter from them bringing back memories of times and places past, I have witnessed further demonstrations of the determination of these plucky little birds. The first time was to my prolonged consternation and the second time drove me to the edge of distraction over the course of a week.
The previous owner of the house had placed a nestbox under the eaves on a South East facing wall to the house. The box was a few yards from the corner with the South West chimney end of the house.
To set this in context, I need to explain a little about the house: When I say chimney end, I don’t just mean that this end wall has a chimney in it. It is just about all chimney. The fireplace being a 6 foot wide inglenook built of 3 foot thick stone walls, the 12 foot wide chimney structure is most of the end of the house.
Just before we bought the house, a substantial part of this chimney collapsed, leaving us with little choice at the time to move into a house which was a substantial building project. The net result was that the entire end wall of the house had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Furthermore, part of the side walls needed to be dismantled to ‘tie’ the new wall into the old stone wall structure.
To return to the sparrows: the nestbox on the side wall had clearly become occupied by a pair of sparrows, even despite the collapse of the chimney a few yards away over the period in which they must have been building their nest. I can only imagine the sanguine way in which this event must have been discussed in sparrow language at the time.. chip, chirp, cheep...
They shrugged the event off and continued with their nest, while scaffold was erected around the end of the house. This, they seemed to take as intended purely for their benefit, as providing a much more convenient landing platform close to the nest from which they could then flit in one quick move across to it.
The rest of the end wall was dismantled together with the part of the side wall, to within a yard of the nest. The sparrows carried on regardless. Their only concession to the reality around them seemed to be to wait for a moment, to time their ins and outs of the nest if someone was too close. Even this, though, seemed more in the nature of waiting for a gap in the traffic at a busy junction than any great concern about the surrounding activity.
The wall was successfully rebuilt and by the time the bit closest to the nest had been done, the chicks had already fledged. One day I saw a couple of them perched on the convenient scaffolding outside, presumably accepting this as the standard arrangement for a sparrow nest, having never seen any other arrangement.
It is little wonder that the phrase ‘cockney sparrow’ came to have great resonance during the ‘Blitz’ in London during WW2. The same shrugging it off, “we’ll keep going with daily life no matter how impossible it seems” attitude, would seem to apply equally to the defiant spirit of Londoners at the time to the brave little birds on our wall.
The following spring, it was great to notice again the sparrows building in the same box. It seems likely to me that it was the same pair. It was a pleasant anticipation to expect again the cheering chirping to come from outside the window of the room where I paint for the coming year.
To start with I was not disappointed, and enjoyed the springtime chatter coming through the wall. But come May time that year, I was disturbed from my work by a strange tapping sound. After initially disregarding it as a neighbour working with a hammer or something similar, as it continued I realised that it didn’t have the right kind of rhythm for that, and it sounded much closer.
On investigation, I rounded the corner into the back porch to find the male sparrow tapping repeatedly at the window with its beak. When I got close enough to the window, the bird flew off. Walking outside and looking, I could see the bright sun made the window highly reflective. I figured the bird must have seen its own reflection, and viewing it as an interloper in its hard earned territory (which after all it had survived the previous year’s ‘Blitz’ in!), was pecking at it to send it off.
I smiled to myself as witness to a curious incident and returned to my desk, assuming it to be over. Ten minutes later the noise started again; after a minute or so of this, I went through to the porch and the sparrow flew off. Back to work again and ...well, you can see where this is going. It happened over a dozen times that day: if I tried to ignore it, it went on and on and if I went through, the bird flew off, only to return again in a little while...tap..tap..tap..tap..
Then late afternoon it stopped. I guess the sun moved around enough to banish the strength of the reflection. With a sense of relief, the concentration flow returned for the rest of the day’s work. But late morning the following day, he was back hard at it...tap...tap....
I tried many different things that week. I opened one of the two windows, hoping the reflection would thus disappear, but then his activity moved to the adjacent window (which couldn’t open). I hung a sheet up from the fascia above, but the breeze would move it and the bird would find a little corner where the reflection was visible to continue. I tried leaving the interior light on to reduce the reflection. All was to no avail. It went on for most of the week, one little bird determined to defend his territory at the cost of spending most of his day engaged in the fruitless activity of tapping at a window. I wondered too what his mate thought of his activities, did she view it as heroic and selfless defence of the family; or a rather thankless displacement activity to dodge some of the rather more necessary core task of nest building?!
Then it stopped. I was grateful, as it had been hard maintaining concentration on work, and I had a fear that this was to be the shape of the rest of summer. I’ll never know whether the bird decided the reflection was no longer a threat, or if the reflection had changed with the position of the sun in the sky or whether the demands of getting on with a nest simply superseded the value of this task. I had though, once again, witnessed a display of determination of character second to none in one of these tiny nondescript brownish birds, no bigger than my fist.