Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  There is no shortage of theories. Although they eat bread, dog food, and other scraps, sparrows are seed eaters at heart, so some suggested a lack of seed was the problem. But when the theory was tested by supplying seed to the birds year-round, it made no difference.

  A lack of the invertebrates that young sparrows are reared on was another explanation. “Where sparrows don’t have enough insects they tend to feed their young with bread and peanuts and rubbish like that, and usually you’ll see high rates of chick mortality in situations like that,” says Will. But when Will and his team tried dishing out juicy mealworms to London’s sparrows, it only helped the smaller colonies and did little to aid larger gatherings of the birds.

  Others pointed the finger at pet cats and sparrowhawks. Yet cat ownership in London has changed little in the past twenty years, and studies suggest that cats kill more blackbirds than sparrows anyhow.

  The case against sparrowhawks seems more convincing. These small birds of prey, which feed on a variety of birds (not just sparrows), are making a comeback in British cities after being almost wiped out by the notorious pesticide DDT. But although sparrow numbers are lower in urban gardens where sparrowhawks are active, that could simply be because sparrows avoid the area or evade capture by hiding in dense vegetation. Equally, there are plenty of places where sparrows and sparrowhawks live side by side, suggesting that sparrowhawks simply don’t eat enough sparrows to be the sole cause of the decline.

  Wilder theories have also been floated. Some suggested that electromagnetic radiation from cell phone masts could be affecting the birds since there are fewer sparrows in places where there are more masts. But, says Will, these are “also the highly urbanized places where you might expect to see fewer sparrows anyway.”

  Maybe it’s genetic, others suggested. Since sparrows don’t travel far, there’s little mixing of urban and rural populations of the birds, and city sparrows do have slightly less genetic variation than their country cousins. Trouble is no one knows what, if any, difference that makes.

  Architectural changes are a better culprit. Buildings define the urban landscape and have a major bearing on what can and cannot thrive within cities. This theory is supported by a study that looked at how sparrows fare in different areas within English cities. It found that poorer neighborhoods offered more suitable habitat for the birds than the better-off areas. So in Golborne, one of the most deprived wards in London, where the brutalist concrete of Trellick Tower looms over high-crime streets, sparrows should do well. Yet three miles south in Queen’s Gate, home to Harrods and the city’s super-rich, the sparrow should be a rarer sight.

  Like starlings, sparrows have their own architectural preferences. They like houses built before 1945 best—and the more run-down they are the better, because that means there are more holes to nest in. Newer buildings are less welcoming, offering fewer nooks and crannies for nesting. Richer areas also have housing in a better state of repair, and house sparrows are less common in areas where houses have been renovated in the past decade. “If you replace your rotting, wooden soffit boards with PVC, which a lot of people do, the sparrows are excluded,” says Will, adding that as property prices have risen, more and more Londoners are paving over their front gardens to turn them into parking spaces, which means there are also fewer sources for the seed and insects sparrows eat.

  In short, as our cities improve, the house sparrow loses out.

  Few places are undergoing as much development as Nashik in Maharashtra, India. This metropolis of one and a half million people is the sixteenth fastest-growing city in the world. Space is tight and the noise of construction is never far away. New high rises are springing up, and so many people are moving in from the countryside that the city is struggling to build the infrastructure needed to cope with them fast enough.

  It’s a pattern being replicated across India. The country is urbanizing at breakneck speed, and as ramshackle streets with ramshackle houses give way to office blocks and shopping malls, the sparrow is in retreat.

  “In my childhood the sparrows were so numerous,” recalls Mohammed Dilawar, who grew up in Nashik in the 1980s. Back then less than half a million people lived there. “At that time in Indian homes you could have sparrows making nests behind the window panes, on top of the cupboards, between suitcases. Even in the homes there were sparrow nests.” Mohammed’s own family home had sparrows nesting in the canopy of their ceiling fan. “If it was summer and the sparrow nest was there, you would stop using the fan,” he tells me.

  Did people not object to birds living in their homes? I ask. “We were brought up not to disturb the sparrow nest. In those times hygiene and these issues were not so much of a care. That was the kind of culture of we had in India, a very open culture. A culture where your neighbor could regularly just walk into your home unannounced.”

  Sparrows were not the only bird that imprinted itself on Mohammed’s childhood. “I used to see hundreds of vultures foraging every day and that used to fascinate me—to see these vultures sitting there. Since we did not have access to a lot of other things, my entire childhood was spent seeing sparrows, birds, and vultures.”

  Today, he rarely sees vultures. The few that are left live on the outskirts of Nashik in tiny groups. The fate of the vultures haunts Mohammed: “The Indian species of vulture went from being the most common raptor in the world to being the most critically endangered bird. It only took ten years, which is faster than the extinction of the dodos.”

  What he finds saddest is that no one even noticed. “Because of a society that was deprived, we didn’t have access to things like television or the mobiles, so when these things came in people got so engrossed in the television and their mobiles they didn’t even realize what they were losing around them.”

  Mohammed figured that if the vulture could go from abundance to near extinction in a few years then so too could his beloved sparrows. So he decided to act. He founded the conservation group Nature Forever Society and launched World Sparrow Day, an international event designed to raise awareness of the sparrow’s plight. He persuaded the government of Delhi to make the sparrow the official bird of the Indian capital and started selling tens of thousands of cheap bird feeders and nest boxes to Indian city dwellers who wanted to give the sparrow a helping hand.

  Mohammed says the sparrow is like the tiger—a gauge of ecological health. It is the canary in the coal mine, “the ambassador for urban conservation,” and its success—or lack of it—reflects how suitable our cities are for wildlife.

  “India is one of the most rapidly growing countries in the world,” he says. “Most of the population in the coming years is going to be concentrated in urban locations or cities. Now imagine cities of tomorrow that are devoid of nature, devoid of sparrows and other birds.

  “A common man in India, from when he is born to the time he dies, might not go outside the city. There are a lot of people in India who find it difficult to get two square meals a day, so you can’t expect those people to spend a fortune to go to a national park to see a tiger. For such a population, the sparrow and other birds that stay in urban locations are the only connection between humanity and wildlife.”

  Mohammed’s campaign has made waves. Time magazine even named him one of the world’s foremost environmental heroes. But many challenges remain.

  The time when sparrows could freely nest in people’s ceiling fans is being left behind. “Somewhere in the 1990s the culture in India started changing, so from being a very open culture it started becoming a closed culture or a private culture of the type one sees in the UK or the western countries,” he says. “Open windows started closing up, and from a culture where you knew everything what is happening in the family of your neighbor, today we are in a culture where you don’t even realize who your neighbor is. Because of this closed culture, the homes started getting closed and these sites were lost for sparrows.”

  The way food is sold in India is another important change, he adds. “Duri
ng the ’80s women used to sit outside their homes cleaning grains and other vegetables, so there was food for the sparrow. Today, women no longer sit outside their homes and clean grain in India. They just walk into a store and buy pre-packed grain. This answers a lot of the reason why the food source for sparrows has gone down.”

  Another pressure India’s city sparrows face is being killed not by cats or sparrowhawks but by people armed with plastic catapults that cost as little as five rupees. That’s about eight cents. The reason the birds are being hunted is simple: hunger. “In India the cost of fresh fish or meat is very high now. A lot of people cannot afford buying protein over the counter, so they go out and kill wild animals because it’s free,” says Mohammed, who wants the Indian government to ban people from using catapults in this way. “This problem is increasing in cities because a lot of people who used to live in rural areas have migrated to the cities as laborers, and these people have the skills and knowledge to kill urban wildlife.”

  As India continues to urbanize, the pressure on the sparrow is likely to grow but, Mohammed says, the fight to save the oldest bird on the city block—a bird whose success reflects the state of the towns and cities we live in—is too important to fail. “When you save a species like sparrows, or for that matter any other wildlife found around cities, you don’t only save them, but you save a lot of plants that depend on them. You save a lot of landscapes,” he says. “A city becomes healthy if there is a big enough amount of wildlife within. This is something that is very, very important.”

  The contrasting attitudes to the declining house sparrow and the starlings that invade US cities says a lot about how we view urban wildlife. When house sparrows were abundant in cities, we viewed them as pests and berated them for causing many of the same problems as the starlings of Indianapolis. But now that they are vanishing from our streets, we see them as lovable victims in need of rescue rather than elimination.

  It’s not a matter of us preferring sparrows over starlings, either. In European cities, starlings have been declining fast too, prompting campaigns to save the birds that cause so many problems in urban America.

  It seems we have a love-hate relationship with urban wildlife. We want animals around us, but only if they know their place. We revile them when they succeed at living among us, but we’ll miss them when they’re gone.

  STREET HUNTERS

  Living with Boars and Raccoons in Berlin

  “Smell! Smell!” says Derk Ehlert, using his hand to waft the air toward his nose. He takes a long, deep breath. “You can smell them. Mmm. Mmm. Ahhhh.”

  I sniff the forest air, wondering what it is I’m supposed to smell and then it hits: a whiff that brings dank mushrooms to mind.

  It’s the smell of wild boar.

  We’re in Berlin. Grunewald, the large forest in the city’s southwest, to be precise. It’s dusk and the fading light makes it hard to see, but somewhere in the trees straight ahead of us are boars.

  Not only can we smell them, but we can hear them too: the rustle of hooves moving through leaves, the snorts of boars snuffling in the soil, and a moist crunching sound. “They are eating all the acorns,” whispers Derk in his German-accented English.

  More munching noises come from the trees. Then, an abrupt squeal. Something moves in the shadows, but I can’t make it out. “A call from the ma,” says Derk.

  Everything’s suddenly silent. The rustling, snuffling and munching has stopped. The boars have realized we’re here. “They are freezing,” says Derk. “They can smell us.”

  The silence lasts half a minute and then there’s a deep groan, a long, drawn-out ooooorrrrgggghhh. We catch a glimpse of a piglet moving away from us into the bushes and then the sound of more movement. The boars are leaving.

  We’ve unnerved them. The boars of Berlin may be used to people, but we’re not acting right and that could mean we’re hunters, so they’ve opted to head deeper into the trees and further away from us.

  “Hunters behave differently,” says Derk. “They sneak up, go off the paths. Hunters, if they want to see the boars, might talk out loud to themselves because for the boars normal, talky people walking along are not a problem. It’s the sneaking people with the funny smell that worry them.”

  More than three thousand of these coarse-haired wild pigs live in Berlin. We may have gone looking for them in Grunewald, but their search for food makes them regular visitors to the city streets. In the suburbs they dig up gardens, tip over bins to get to leftovers, and plough the parks. One time wild boars tore up a Second World War cemetery, uprooting gravestones and causing thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.

  Another time, they broke through the fence guarding the training field of Berlin soccer club Hertha BSC. Once inside they ripped up the pitch to feast on the roots and grubs below the grass. The club repaired the fence, but the shaggy vandals returned, found a new way in, and churned up the pitch for a second time.

  The boars are aided in their search by an amazing sense of smell. Their noses are three times as sensitive as those of dogs, making them capable of sniffing out damp soil from as far as two miles away. Perfect for finding the prime feeding spots in the city.

  As Berlin’s only wildlife officer, Derk has plenty of experience with the boars. The day before I visited, he had to deal with one that got hit by a car while crossing a busy road. Though the boars usually leave people alone, when wounded they can be dangerous.

  In fall 2012 another collision caused a 260-pound boar to go on the rampage in the leafy western Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. The first victim was an elderly man, who was bitten on the back of his leg. The boar then knocked over an old lady before attacking a young woman who had to scramble on top of a parked car to escape. When a policeman came to the rescue, the boar charged at him, cutting the officer’s leg. The injured officer ended up drawing his gun and fatally shooting the animal in the middle of the usually quiet residential street.

  The previous day’s incident was less serious. Well, for Berliners, at least. “The boar was mortally wounded but still alive, so it was really important it was killed,” Derk tells me as we drive throughout Charlottenburg. But taking down an injured boar in a busy city is no easy feat, so Derk called in one of Berlin’s city hunters, an elite troop of volunteer huntsmen he has recruited for exactly this kind of situation.

  Derk has thirty Stadtjägers, as the city hunters are known in German, he can call on. They are some of the area’s most experienced hunters and they need to be, for hunting in the streets is a risky business. Not only must they contend with wild boars that often know the streets better than them, but they have to be sure their shots won’t hit someone by accident or ricochet off the hard urban surfaces with potentially lethal consequences.

  “They have to be really experienced. They have to be very good at dealing with people and their weapons,” says Derk.

  The risk is so high that the Stadtjägers, rather than the city authorities, are the ones who are liable if anything goes wrong. It might sound like a bum deal for the hunters, but there is an upside, as they get to keep the meat of any boars they kill to sell or eat themselves. But even that comes with a caveat. Many of the boars they have to kill are sick or injured, so there’s a good chance the meat is unfit to eat. This was the case yesterday.

  “They did ultimately kill it and it was a very big animal, but it was not appropriate to be sold because the boar had so much adrenaline going through its blood after being hit by the car that it was no longer edible,” he explains through the interpreter who is sitting in the back, helping out whenever Derk’s English fails him. “The question then is what do you do with the dead body? It was clear it could not be eaten, but it had to be removed.”

  Derk ended up loading the dead boar into the back of his car and taking it to a vet to be disposed of. The interpreter, who is sitting right where the dead boar was, eyes the seat warily. “You’ve cleaned the car since then, right?” she asks, only half joking.

 
Why don’t you get the police to shoot them? I ask. “A good question,” says Derk. “For ten years we have been at the police school telling them how to shoot the wild boar, but the police often they don’t want to kill them. They ask what can we do? Can we bring the wild boar to the doctor?”

  Paperwork is another problem. “If they use their weapon they have to write out why they did it. It’s a long form, more than fourteen sides of paper, and then they get an official notice in their file that says they used the weapon. If they then want a different position or a promotion, they have this notice saying they’ve used their weapon. So even if they are stationed in an area with a lot of wild boars, they prefer not to shoot them because it might ruin their chances of getting promoted.”

  Even when the police do act, they can make mistakes. “Sometimes they misunderstand the situation. In the spring we had a wild boar that was bearing her young in the middle lane of a street, and a cop came and shot it because he thought it was a wounded animal. It caused a huge scandal in the newspapers.” As a result the police usually call in the Stadtjägers when there’s a boar to shoot and restrict themselves to closing off the streets so it is easier for the hunters to make the kill. On average the police call Derk and his Stadtjägers three or four times a week.

  While there is a steady stream of incidents needing the help of hunters, most of the calls Derk gets about the boars come from people who have had their gardens invaded or object to the very sight of the wild swine in the city.

  One especially irate woman called Derk only a few hours before we met. “She was shocked that at ten in the morning she sees a wild boar when walking in the forest. She says it is a problem because children with bicycles go to the forest at that time. But the forest is a normal neighborhood for wild boars. I told her that it is not possible to abolish the wild boars, that they are not dangerous for the children, and that I have never heard of wild boars eating kids—it is not possible. But she was angry with my answer because she wanted to hear another thing. She wants to hear that the army is coming now.”