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Garden birds: No more scoffing now

Last century someone had an idea to help a membership drive and raise useful funds. The idea was to get people to count birds in their gardens. It wasn't meant to be serious; more a fun way to enage with an audience. It turns out the audience was vast and increasingly this fun piece of public relations took on a new and perhaps deadly serious purpose. Out national bird populations were in steep decline.

Studies of farmland birds were turning into obituaries. Small birds were vanishing. Species that no one had much bothered with since there were so 'ubiquitous' had numbers dropping like stones into a gulf. Suddenly the amateurs with their notebooks and peanut feeders across the realm were promoted like some birdwatching Dad's Army into the front line of British ornithology. Bird counts taken in overwhelmingly urban and suburban gardens were vital. It also turned out to be tens of thousands of all ages and types of people who could also be counted on. No one was patronisingly smiling on granny and grandad's gnomes and bird table any more.

Birds are shifting into the suburbs as never before. Birds that never used bird feeders such as the brightly coloured Goldfinch turn up mob handed and breed increasingly across cities; a pair nested in a street tree outside HMV in Newcastle's teeming Northumberland Street three years ago. The nest was still there recently.

Switching direction very slightly, another fact intrigued me.

There is no more competitive and ruthless business than general and household retail selling on the British High Street. Large companies that get their business wrong go under – fast. It is not sentimental, nothing like Open All Hours. So why does Wilko's Byker sell so much bird food and bird food dispensers?

Typical: Wilko's sellers of quality bird food

Byker's Shield's Road was described by some journalist as possibly the worst shopping street in the country. It has about nine feet by over six feet (in old money) of shelf space devoted to many kinds of bird food and bird feeders, plain and workmanlike to fancy and ornamental. A cashier told me she had no idea there were 'so many kinds of bird food'. Does it sell well? "Oh, yes. Lots."

So why is 'possibly the nation's worse High Street' buying so much bird food? Because they care. In a tough place to live through Austerity 02, people yet have a thought (and cash) to put out bird food in this somewhat benighted and severely under rated inner city district*.

I am more and more persuaded that if protecting 'nature', as the valiant Save Newcastle's Wildlife group are attempting to do, means anything it must include more of this overlooked group, the bird lovers of the inner city. I also believe that the term nature conservation should itself be broadened to include more of the what some of the more serious minded would consider inconsequential to its purpose: The transient nature most of us meet with everyday. The rapidly diminishing Green Belt isn't all of it. Not by a long way.



*Photographic essay on Byker coming soon!