Sparrow numbers fall to lowest recorded

Another bell tolls for the house sparrow today. New figures show that numbers of our most familiar bird have fallen to the lowest level recorded to date in Britain's gardens.

Over the past winter, house sparrow flocks in suburban and rural gardens, as recorded by the Garden Bird Feeding Survey of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) were the smallest since observations began in 1970.

A puzzling feature of the fall – which is matched by a similar decline in numbers of the starling – is that the amount of food people are putting out in their gardens is at an all-time high.

Last year householders spent £180m on specialist food for wild birds, and put 20,000 tons of peanuts and 16,000 tons of seed onto their bird tables and lawns.

Much of the seed is high-energy mixes put together with expert ornithological advice and far more helpful to the birds than the scraps of bread and fat which were put out in the past. But £180m worth of food or not, the house sparrow "seems to be in free-fall," Mr Glue said, comparing it with the passenger pigeon – which was America's commonest bird in the mid-19th century, and extinct by 1914.

The cause of the sparrow's decline in urban areas remains a mystery, said Humphrey Crick, the BTO scientist leading research on its falling numbers. "These new figures are another indication of just how serious the decline is," he said.