Beer - RSPB Spotlight Sparrows

Seen clearly, House Sparrows are far more splendid than the rather dismissive label little brown job suggests. The plumage patterns are most striking in spring.

The cosmopolitan House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is probably the most familiar bird on the planet after the domestic chicken, and is regarded with a peculiar mixture of affection and animosity. The abundance of this particular species has prompted a significant body of research, but the familiarity of sparrows as a group has earned them a sort of invisibility. For most of recorded history, they have been so common that they scarcely warranted attention beyond largely unsuccessful attempts to exterminate those that took too many liberties with our jealously guarded crops. Indeed, these archetypal little brown jobs (as birders like to call the plethora of occasionally hard-to-distinguish species in the order Passeriformes) were so numerous as to be scorned even by naturalists. In his 1896 Dictionary of Birds, Cambridge ornithologist Alfred Newton dismissed the House Sparrow as far too well known to need any description of its appearance or habits. However, in Britain at least, perceptions of sparrows have begun to change. When their numbers decreased suddenly and dramatically towards the end of the 20th century, we started to miss them, and to wonder what on earth was going on. Twenty years later, we still dont fully understand the decline, but we are finding new respect and fondness for our two native sparrow species.

The birds next door

The common name sparrow comes from the Old English speerwa, which in turn originates in the Aryan verb spar, to flutter, and perfectly encapsulates the restless movement of a flock all agitation and energy. The name sparrow has been applied to a wide variety of birds, not all of which are closely related, and many of which have since been reclassified, for example as buntings, finches and American sparrows. The species in this book are true sparrows, of the genus Passer. They belong in the family Passeridae, or Old World sparrows, although the range of some now extends into the Americas, Australasia and Micronesia.

In his first attempt at a systematic classification of living things in 1758, the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus named the House Sparrow Fringilla domestica, and grouped it alongside common seed-eating finches such as the Chaffinch (F. coelebs) and Brambling (F. montifringilla). This error was corrected two years later by French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson, who established a new genus and named it Passer, the Latin word for sparrow, which was probably applied to a wide range of little brown birds in Roman times.

Passer is a name that hints at familiarity, and this is the type genus (the archetypal form on which other classifications are based) not only of the family Passeridae, but also of the vast bird order Passeriformes, otherwise known as the perching birds, which includes more than half of all bird species. A heavy burden of representative responsibility rests on those mundanely plumaged shoulders.