Hi everyone it's Liam here from a short of wildlife and in today's video I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about the house sparrow. Let's begin. The house sparrow recently came in at the top place in the UK Big Garden birdwatch and there have fought to be more than five million pairs in the country so it might come as a surprise that these noisy, gregarious little birds are less than half as common as they were in the late 1970s. House sparrow is a slightly larger than Robbins. We're a wingspan of 21 to 25 centimetres and grow it to where around 31 grams. Both the males and females have model ground wings but the males have distinctive head markings that help to separate them. This includes white to cream cheek patches, a gray cap, chestnut markings down the back of the head and a black bib. Young birds look very similar to females but have a more washed out appearance and have slightly yellow looking beaks. As their name suggests house sparrows have long been associated with people with records of them living alongside us as early as 11,000 years ago in the Middle East. Since then they've spread with people across most of Europe, Northern Africa and Asia and over the last 200 years they've also colonized much of the American continents and Australia. This relationship with people has been supported by two main factors. Firstly they have managed to find lots of suitable nesting sites around our houses and other structures, often nesting beneath loose roof tiles and in the eaves of buildings and secondly because they have an ability to digest the starched foods that we produce in agriculture such as potatoes, corn and wheat. They can also eat a wide range of other foods including seeds, berries and fruits and also insects throughout the spring and summer. When it comes to nesting house sparrows prefer to do it communally and will often nest very close to other pairs. When this is an under tiles and in eaves they will also use man-made nest boxes, holes in trees and amongst dense bushes and ivy. Each female will lay between three and five model cream and brown eggs. Both parents share the incubation juice and the eggs take between 11 and 14 days to hatch. Incubation starts before all of the eggs are laid and this means that as the chicks develop some of them will be smaller than others. If there isn't enough food whilst the chicks are being reared this will give the larger and stronger ones more chance to out-complete their siblings and to successfully fledge. Once hatched the chicks take from 14 to 16 days to fledge the nest, the parents then feed them for a further two weeks before they are fully independent. In the UK house sparrows don't migrate but they sometimes disperse away from their breeding areas throughout the winter to find food elsewhere. As mentioned before house sparrows have suffered as a fear decline since the 1970s which has been attributed to changes in farming practices and to modern houses providing less suitable nesting sites. This decline seems to be living out in some places with populations in Scotland and Northern Ireland increasing over the past few years. The house sparrows average lifespan is just three years but in Texas in 2004 a bird was found that had been rings more than 15 years before. Well that's everything you need to know about the house sparrows and that's the end of this video. I'd like to quickly say that I've recently hit 3,000 subscribers on this channel and that's a massive massive achievement but if you haven't subscribed yet then do so now so you don't miss my future videos. If you did enjoy this one then check out one of these two other British wildlife videos thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.