House Sparrow

A stocky little bird, 14 to 17 cm (5.5 to 6.7 in) long and about 27 g (1 oz), about the size of a Chaffinch.¹ It has a full chest, a big rounded head, a short tail and a thick, stout bill made for seeds.²

The male is the one to learn. He has a grey crown, framed by chestnut that runs from behind the eye round the sides and back of the neck; pale grey cheeks; and a black bib on the throat and upper breast. His back is warm brown streaked with black, and one white bar crosses the chestnut shoulder. In the breeding season his bill is black.³ The female is plainer: brown above with a striped back, plain grey-brown below, and a pale buff stripe behind the eye.

Town birds often look dull and grubby, while country birds are crisper and more contrasting.

Adults are easy to sex. Only the male has the grey cap, the chestnut and the black bib. In autumn and winter his bib is partly hidden by pale feather tips and his bill turns yellowish; through the spring the tips wear away and the bib shows solid black again by the breeding season.

Young birds look like females, a little buffier, and recently fledged ones show a yellow gape at the base of the bill. Young males often show a hint of a greyish bib. More: male and female House Sparrows.

In Britain the other sparrow is the Tree Sparrow. Both sexes have an all-chestnut cap and a black spot on a white cheek, which no House Sparrow shows; it is smaller, with a small bib, and rarely comes into town gardens. The Dunnock, the old "hedge sparrow", is not a sparrow at all: look for its thin, pointed bill and grey head and breast, and its habit of creeping about alone or in pairs.

In North America the usual mix-up is the House Finch. The male finch is rosy red on the face and breast; the female is grey-brown with thick, blurry streaks below and a plain face, where a female House Sparrow is unstreaked below and has the pale stripe behind the eye.⁴ More: House Sparrow vs House Finch. North America's native sparrows, such as the Song Sparrow, are not related: they belong to a different family.

The sound of a House Sparrow is the cheep: a loud, simple cheep or chirrup, repeated over and over. That is the song too, given mainly by males near their nest to attract a mate. They also give a scolding chur, sometimes run into a chur-tit-tit-tit, when squabbling or alarmed.

In spring, groups call together from deep inside hedges and bushes, a cheerful chirping chorus. They cheep all year, most in spring, less on cold, wet winter days, and they can fall quiet in August. A male has up to four types of cheep and usually favours one, and close neighbours rarely favour the same one.³ More, with five recordings: House Sparrow song and calls.

All year, wherever people live. In Britain they are commonest in towns and villages, and also live on farms, especially around farmyards. They occur in about 90% of the 10-km squares of Britain and Ireland, missing only from the exposed uplands of northern Scotland, though they are thin on the ground in south-east England and East Anglia.⁵

Their native range runs across Europe and Asia from the British Isles and Scandinavia to North Africa, Arabia, India and Burma. People have taken them to North and South America, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand. They avoid big woods, forests, open grassland and desert: where there are few people, there are few House Sparrows.

Listen for cheeping from roofs, gutters and thick hedges, then look for a group. In spring, watch holes in walls and roofs for birds carrying grass. On dry days look for them dust-bathing in bare soil.

No. House Sparrows stay put. Of more than 90,000 records of ringed House Sparrows found again, the BTO lists just four that had crossed the sea: two to France, one to Belgium and one to an oil platform in the Norwegian Sea. The longest move within Britain was 658 km (409 miles), from Oxford to Moray.⁶ Once settled, adults stay mainly within 1 to 2 km (about a mile) of their colony; it is mainly young birds that move, dispersing from where they hatched in late summer and autumn.

The exceptions are in Central Asia, where two races do migrate: one breeds in Turkestan and winters in Pakistan and north-west India, and one breeds high in the Himalaya and moves lower for the winter. In North America House Sparrows do not migrate.

If your sparrows seem to vanish in late summer, they have probably moved to better feeding. After nesting, flocks of young birds and then adults move to ripening fields and other rich feeding places, and the adults moult in late summer and autumn.

House Sparrows are not native to North America. The introduction that took hold is usually traced to 100 birds bought in England and released in Brooklyn, New York, in 1851 and 1852; more releases followed, from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. From about 50 pairs in 1853 they spread to an estimated 150 million birds by 1943. Today they live year-round from southern Canada through the United States and most of Mexico, always close to buildings.

The House Sparrow is not protected by the US Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which does not cover its family, the Old World sparrows.⁷ It competes with native hole-nesters such as the Eastern Bluebird and Purple Martin for nest sites. In the east, numbers peaked around 1900 and have declined since. More: are House Sparrows invasive?

Mostly seeds and grain: weed and grass seeds, spilt cereal, birdseed and scraps. In the breeding season they add insects, and their chicks are raised mostly on insects and other small invertebrates. They are complete opportunists, taking fruit, buds, crumbs, insects drawn to lights at night and moths flushed by lawn mowers.

More: what sparrows eat.

The RSPB says House Sparrows particularly love fat balls and sunflower hearts. Offer sunflower hearts in a hanging seed feeder and fat balls in a hanging mesh feeder (never a mesh bag). Since July 2026 the RSPB advises hanging feeders only, not bird tables, trays or window feeders, where disease spreads most easily, and a pause on seed and peanuts from 1 May to 31 October, when small amounts of fat balls, suet or mealworms are fine. Clean feeders weekly.⁸

House Sparrows nest in holes: holes and crevices in buildings and walls, gutters and nest boxes, and sometimes in hedges or creepers. They often nest close together in small colonies. The nest is an untidy mass of dry grass lined with feathers; out in a hedge or tree it becomes a domed ball with a side entrance.

In Britain the first clutch is laid on average on 14 May, anywhere from late March to July, and pairs raise two or three broods. A clutch is usually 4 or 5 eggs, incubated for 12 to 15 days, and the chicks leave the nest at about 15 days old.⁵ More: House Sparrow nesting and baby sparrows.

A small hole-fronted box with a 32 mm (1.25 in) hole suits them, the size the BTO recommends for all small hole-nesting birds.⁹ Because they nest in colonies, the RSPB suggests putting up several boxes, ideally with your neighbours along a street. Keep sparrow boxes away from boxes for other birds, and especially from House Martin colonies.

Sociable and busy. House Sparrows hop rather than walk, feed in groups on the ground, and bathe together, in water or in dust: a bird shuffles into dry soil, throws it over its fluffed-up body and leaves a little hollow, which it defends against others. Their wings are short and they are not strong fliers, so they stay close to cover, ready to dash in if a predator appears.

In spring a male courts by puffing out his chest, drooping his wings, raising his tail and hopping and bowing in front of a female, and other males often join in. Males with bigger bibs tend to rank higher in the flock. At dusk flocks often gather to chirp together before going to roost in dense bushes or trees.

About 3 years on average for a bird that reaches breeding age; most breed when one year old. About 57% of adults survive from one year to the next, and about 49% of young birds survive their first year.⁵

The oldest House Sparrow on the BTO's list for Britain and Ireland was ringed as a young male at Bedwas, Caerphilly, in 2008 and was still alive there in 2022, 13 years, 8 months and 22 days later.¹⁰ The oldest ringed House Sparrow in Europe, in Denmark, lived 18 years and 10 months¹¹, and the oldest in North America, in Texas, 15 years and 9 months.¹²

Cats and Sparrowhawks catch House Sparrows and are often blamed for their decline, but the BTO finds no evidence in national data that rising Sparrowhawk numbers caused it. In North America hawks, falcons, owls and shrikes all take House Sparrows.

Red-listed in the UK since 2002. There are about 5.3 million pairs (2016), and House Sparrows are still the commonest bird in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, top for 21 years. But they are far fewer than they were: the RSPB estimates a fall of 71% between 1977 and 2008. The UK population dropped by a further 18% between 1995 and 2024, though numbers have risen in Scotland and Wales.⁵

The loss has been worst in towns, in the south and east, and in London, where suburban House Sparrows fell by 71% from 1995.¹³ Worldwide the species is of Least Concern.

There is no single cause, and farmland and town birds seem to have declined for different reasons. On farms, the main driver was lower survival, especially of young birds, as winter food ran short: less spilt grain, tidier farmyards and fewer winter stubbles.⁵

In towns the evidence is less clear. Chicks may go short of insects: in a London experiment, daily mealworms increased the number of young birds out of the nest by 62%, though the number of breeding males barely changed.¹⁴ A review suggests they may have been lost mainly from better-off areas, perhaps as gardens filled with ornamental shrubs and were paved for parking. And avian malaria may play a part: in the London colonies studied it infected 74% of House Sparrows on average, and birds with heavier infections survived less well.

What helps, says the BTO: native shrubs, natural gardens and green space rather than paving, nest boxes, winter food, and clean feeders.