A trip to the Himalayas... and the world of sparrows - ‘The sound of my childhood’

Bob Jarman recalls an eventful birdwatching expedition, and discusses a sight not as familiar as it once was.

In the early 1970s, six of us decided on a birdwatching expedition to India and Nepal. It followed an overland trip to Kashmir by two of the group two years before on a Lambretta 175cc scooter! We bought a Bedford ‘dormobile’ van from one of our dads and set off from Cambridge, planning to arrive in India after the monsoon a month later. We broke down at Royston.

We limped into Belgium and in a small village, Overhespen, the garage mechanic converted a left-hand drive gearbox to a right-hand drive gearbox and fixed the gear selection problem. We hit a rock in Turkey, our tyres were slashed on the Turkey/Iran border, but we made it to Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan to the Indian border within 30 days. It was my first trip abroad…

Eventually we arrived in Kathmandu and made treks in the Himalayas to Annapurna base camp, to the Tibetan plateau and drove to Assam and the Kasia Hills that overlooked what was then East Pakistan but is now Bangladesh.

The birdwatching was fantastic. We discovered new birds for Nepal. Once, camped at about 12,000 feet above sea level with the snow-capped Himalayas in front of us, thousands of migrating thrushes descended from the skies to make landfall. It disposed of the theory that the Himalayas were too high for birds to migrate over and that they flew round the mountains and then filtered east and west.

There were two species of birds that were almost constant companions and reminded us of home throughout the expedition - house sparrows and tree sparrows. They were abundant in the lowlands around every village, town and cultivated field. Sometimes there were flocks of tree sparrows, but usually there were house sparrows.

House sparrows and tree sparrows are some of the most declining birds in Europe. House sparrows attract little attention because it is assumed they are so common, but they are not. Recently I saw a pre-roost flock of at least 80 birds in the garden hedges of a cul-de-sac in Milton. It was the biggest flock I have seen for ages. There was a frenzy of activity as they attempted to settle before dusk. In the mid-1970s a flock of over 4,000 was recorded just a mile or two away, in Chesterton.

House sparrows have become townies and tree sparrows have been reduced to a few isolated colonies in the countryside. Both species have been fatally affected by changes in agriculture, especially the loss of hedgerows for nesting, the use of herbicides, and the continual cycle of winter crops which have left no weedy winter stubble on which to feed.

The most recent house sparrow survey of Cambridge found 733 nest sites and a probable total population of 1,000 pairs. They were most common in Cherry Hinton, Abbey, and King’s Hedges wards. In west Cambridge and the city centre they were almost extinct. “They were the sound of my childhood” said a friend who used to live near Newnham.

The best place I know to see sparrows is the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Welney. Both species can be watched on the feeders, and you can clearly see the differences between the two species. House sparrows are sexually dimorphic – the male and female sparrows are quite different; male and female tree sparrows look alike. Both species nest in colonies; for house sparrows I think the minimum colony size is three to four closely associated nests. If a nest is lost in a minimum sized colony, then the colony itself could fail.

What’s to be done about our sparrows? A terrace of three or four nest boxes on an east facing wall (east because it warms up with the morning sun) might attract a colony to establish itself and return those friendly and familiar “cheeps” and “chirps” we have lost.