Meeting of the Parliament 08 November 2016
I congratulate Graeme Dey on securing the debate. I am pleased to state that this is my second year as species champion for the house sparrow, or speug. I am doing my bit for them, because my garden is bursting with speugs from dawn to dusk. They live in my neighbour’s holly tree, which I call Speug Towers. They commute to the many feeding stations that I have, living the high life on fat balls, seeds and mealworms. They then visit my neighbour’s birdbath and have a bit of a dip before they move on to my weeping birch for a little bit of a preen and then fly back to Speug Towers.
On occasion, they are confronted by a gang of marauding thrushes, but they simply bide their time and then resume their own quarrelsome feeding. When I walk down the garden to refill the feeders, they tweet to all and sundry that food is on the way. That probably alerts the thrushes.
The speugs provide Mr Smokey, my rescue cat, with hours of tormented pleasure as he eyes them up through glass walls, with chattering teeth. They remind me of a poem by Norman MacCaig called—funnily enough—“Sparrow”:
“He’s no artist.
His taste in clothes is more
dowdy than gaudy.
And his nest—that blackbird, writing
pretty scrolls on the air with the gold nib of his beak,
would call it a slum.
To stalk solitary on lawns,
to sing solitary in midnight trees,
to glide solitary over gray Atlantics—
not for him: he’d rather
a punch-up in a gutter.
He carries what learning he has
lightly—it is in fact, based only
on the usefulness whose result
is survival. A proletarian bird.
No scholar.
But when winter soft-shoes in
and these other birds—
ballet dancers, musicians, architects—
die the snow
and freeze to branches,
watch him happily flying
on the O-levels and A-levels
of the air.”
I say, three cheers for the humble speug: he survives.
17:57