Watching a pied wagtail busily trotting about on a platform at Clapham Junction this morning got me thinking about how dramatically the bird life of town and suburbia has changed in my lifetime. When I was a boy, you would only ever see pied wagtails in the country, always by rivers - ditto herons, which were also very much scarcer than the wagtails. Jays and magpies were country birds, only rarely seen in town - as were long-tailed tits - and crows never appeared in the vast numbers that are common now. Cormorants had been absent from London's river for centuries, and kingfishers were a rare sight anywhere near town. The only bird of prey you might (if you were lucky) see was a kestrel, egrets were unheard of, and the collared dove an exotic vagrant. No one would have dreamed that squadrons of screeching ring-necked parakeets would one day be overflying London's parks... How things change - and it's good that not all the incoming birds are of the broad-shouldered, bullying, scavenging kind. The dainty pied wagtail, with its 'rather sprightly' manner (as the RSPB describes it), is always a joy to see. I first realised just how urban it had become when, one winter dusk, I came across a loudly twittering town centre tree. Taking a closer look, I saw that it was full of roosting pied wagtails - maybe a couple of hundred - settling down for the night, in the full glare of the streetlamps, untroubled by the loud bustle of human life around them. These urban roosts are quite normal now. Wagtails have also been known to roost at sewage treatment centres, riding around through the night on the rotating arms of the sedimentation tanks. That I would like to see...
One of my fitters keeps a small allotment with various vegetables, and he is convinced that pied wagtails are responsible for spoiling some of the growths, but admits that he had never seen them 'in action'. They have somehow never thought of them as hooligans, just cute garden birds with wagging tails.
ReplyDeleteClapham junction - Nige are you my neighbour? Seems Southwest London is home to many wagtails, though today I've only been visited by two magpies and the crazy crows.
ReplyDeleteI was only passing through Susan - staring from the train window...
ReplyDeleteA very interesting post. I too remember the thrill of seeing 'exotic' collared doves first appear in our garden (in Stoke) when I was a boy. I have lived for many years in France but it is only recently that I learned that the 'pied' wagtails I see here are, in fact, white wagtails.
ReplyDeleteBTW you may like to glance through the following site to see what birds are now making themselves at home in Paris (If you're going to pick a city...)
http://lesoiseauxenville.skynetblogs.be/
Fascinating post. I wonder why the parakeet hasn't ventured into the countryside yet?
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