When I was a lad and lived in the slums of Liverpool, our street was full of house sparrows. If you multiplied the numbers of them in the street by the amount of streets and then the amount of towns there must have been millions of them. Now they are practically non existent. My theory is the amount of cars and possibly their exhaust fumes have killed them all off. Still plenty of flying rats (pigeons) though.

Now living in the posh part of Liverpool the most birds we see at one time are the geese flying over to wherever they go every night, at this time of the year, probably the feeding grounds on the Wirral peninsula. Noisy neighbours though aren't they?

God knows where the sparrows got any food in our street then. I can't think of anybody who threw the left overs on the tablecloth in to the street or the back yard. I am also now wondering how the sparrows survived with the amount of cats about the area. I can remember one of them pinching a Sunday joint which one lady down the street had left to cool on the back kitchen window. (Why was it a back kitchen? we never had front ones)... She never lived that down. Now I am wondering how we could afford a Sunday roast? Things were tight before the war. We even got our coal from the railway sidings across the road. Those sparrows are awakening a lot of old memories in my addled brain.