Flights of urban fancy

To mark the upcoming 75th anniversary of the publication of Richard Fitter's seminal book London's Birds, Jack Watkins takes a look at the changing face of the capital's avian population

- Jack Watkins

WHEN Richard Fitter’s London’s Birds was published in 1949, it became the first book to deal exclusively with its eponymous subject for 25 years. Despite such a gap, birds have likely been studied more closely in London for a longer period of time than in any other city in the world. The first record of red kites in the city dates back to the Roman period.

London’s Birds appeared on bookshelves shortly after the Second World War and, as a result, was full of references to birds exploiting bomb sites for nesting and feeding opportunities. Pigeons lived in the dining rooms of damaged Mayfair properties; linnets foraged among the rubble of what was once a house in Campden Hill; wheatears— less familiar to inner London even then —were spotted on the pockmarked ground of Stepney and Cripplegate.

Many species had proven highly adaptable to London life for centuries, explained Fitter (1913–2005). ‘To a bird the city of London must appear as a network of narrow canyons faced by tall cliffs with numerous ledges and crannies,’ he wrote. And although by 1939 there were likely no ploughed fields left across the whole of London— there had been an increase in allotments and the partial ploughing of Bushy Park and Parliament Hill Fields before the war—Fitter describes a metropolis rich in avifauna, albeit changing before his very own eyes.