While mitochrondrial DNA suggest speciation in Passer occurred during the Miocene and Pliocene, British ornithologist J. Denis Summers-Smith considers the russet sparrow to have separated from the other Palearctic black-bibbed sparrows about 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, during the last glacial period.
The house sparrow is typically about 16 cm long, ranging from 14-18 cm.
If a coffee sergeant tells a sparrow cop about a skylarker who sapped someone with a persuader in the park, who is credited with making the collar?
Mao commanded people to eradicate the sparrows by shooting them, destroying their nests, etc., because it was estimated that each sparrow ate about 10 pounds of grain each year and that 60,000 people could be fed for every million sparrows killed.
After all, he's now got two islands to fret about, because, after last year's sparrow-bickers about sexism, there has arrived a rival team of 14 women.
A happier story is Amy Childs from The Only Way Is Essex, the nation's newest booby sweetheart, a chirpy Essex sparrow, famed for standing about in a beautician's tabard saying "Shat ahp!" and having a fey sidekick cousin called Harry who boasts the intellectual prowess of a damp stack of Grattan catalogues.
Figures from the trust show that in 1995, the proportion of gardens reporting one or more house sparrows was about 80%.
Along the wall past Patience, the lion at the south edge of the steps leading to the main entrance, he saw "two sparrows scratching about and right next to them, this brilliant blue and gold bird".
As an extended family of 30 or so recently fledged house sparrows crash about in the garden hedge outside, I know I can rely on Cocker's words to return me to these most ordinary of birds, by saying things that I recognise, but also allowing me to see them anew.
