After a few years living in London, the sound of the strong calls of the house sparrows (Passer domesticus L.) becomes as unfamiliar as the sound of the waves in the sea or the silence. The only place where I always heard and watched sparrows is a tiny little park in the heart of the city: Drury Lane WC2B.
It is a small garden with a minuscule recreation ground for children. It hosts a few couples of very active sparrows
The sparrows have been there, possibly breeding, at least since 2006, when I joined a company whose offices where nearby. Sometimes, usually when it was sunny no matter which seasons, some colleagues and I used to have lunch there. This spring of 2010 the sparrows where there when I visited the garden once again.
I have no clue about why the sparrows reside in that diminutive green spot in the middle of a city that seemingly offers no other sanctuary to the species in a radius of a few miles. I have not seen sparrows feeding in the surrounding streets nor even near the river by Victory Embankment.
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[...] mason temple of Great Queen Street, it is the home of one of the very few parks where you can find sparrows in London, the first of thousands of Sainsbury’s stores was opened there in the nineteenth century, a [...]
House sparrows have very small territories and generally don’t stray far from their birthplace. They like the older type of eaves in buildings for nesting, also gutterings with holes or gaps, and as older properties disappear, together with their favoured habitats such as privet hedges and ivy, so do the sparrows – new developments don’t offer the same features. They’ll cling to their small territories until the territories are uprooted, and when change occurs around them they tend to get marooned on their little islands of green so you can find them in some isolated pockets of green in very odd places in our large cities. I suspect that generations of sparrows have probably lived in Drury Lane since the Middle Ages.
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