London: The Biography полностью

The sparrows move quickly in public places, and they are now so much part of London that they have been adopted by the native population as the “sparrer”; a friend was known to Cockneys as a “cock-sparrer” in tribute to a bird which is sweet and yet watchful, blessed with a dusky plumage similar to that of the London dust, a plucky little bird darting in and out of the city’s endless uproar. They are small birds which can lose body heat very quickly, so they are perfectly adapted to the “heat island” of London. They will live in any small cranny or cavity, behind drain pipes or ventilation shafts, or in public statues, or holes in buildings; in that sense they are perfectly suited to a London topography. An ornithologist who described the sparrow as “peculiarly attached to man” said it “never now breeds at any distance from an occupied building.” This sociability, bred upon the fondness of the Londoner for the sparrow as much as the sparrow for the Londoner, is manifest in many ways. One naturalist, W.H. Hudson, has described how any stranger in a green space or public garden will soon find that “several sparrows are keeping him company … watching his every movement, and if he sit down on a chair or a bench several of them will come close to him, and hop this way and that before him, uttering a little plaintive note of interrogation-Have you got nothing for us?” They have also been described as the urchins of the streets- “thievish, self-assertive and pugnacious”-a condition which again may merit the attention and admiration of native Londoners. Remarkably attached to their surroundings, they rarely create “fly-lines” across the city; where they are born, like other Londoners, they stay.

And so they become associated with, and characterised by, their surroundings. The “Tower sparrows” were notorious as “feathered murderous ruffians” who kept up continual warfare with the pigeons and starlings of the building even though they had shared quarters with them for many centuries. In the autumn of 1738 a bolt of lightning left the ground covered “with heaps of dead sparrows” at Mile End Turnpike. There is something pitiful and yet splendid about this mass slaughter, as if again they represented the spirit of the city itself. These little creatures embody “sheer invincible fecundity,” according to E.M. Nicholson, the author of Bird-Watching in London: “they may be massacred perpetually and raise no obstacle, only they never diminish, that is the salvation of the species.” So their “incessant and indescribable” noise, when congregated in a roost, is the sound of collective triumph, “all mad and very happy,” fluttering and darting in the boughs as if the trees themselves had come alive.

Gulls are now perpetual visitors, although they first arrived in London as late as 1891. They came to enjoy the warmth of the city during a severe winter, and their entry soon excited the attention of Londoners. The citizens thronged upon the bridges and the embankments in order to watch them dive and tumble. In 1892 London magistrates forbade anyone from shooting them, and at that point for the first time the habit of feeding the gulls appeared; clerks and labourers of the 1890s would, during the free hour for lunch, go down to the bridges and offer them various foods. Theodore Dreiser walked upon Blackfriars Bridge one Sunday afternoon, in 1912, and found a line of men feeding “thousands of gulls” with minnows which they purchased at a penny a box. A sense of awe and kindliness, combined, would seem to characterise the native attitude. Yet their success in obtaining food from humans hands led to the continual reappearance of the gulls, until they acquired the reputation of being the principal scavengers of the city, supplanting the services of the raven. So the activity of the city can change the habits, as well as the habitat, of birds.