Years ago I went to Maiden Bradley, in Wiltshire, to see how people were encouraging tree sparrows to return to an area where they had hardly been seen for years. Wide headlands were being left around the ploughed fields and the right feed spread. And now I was walking along the old drove road west of Castle Cary into the wide, watery space of Cary Moor with two folk equipped with binoculars and a telescope. They too hoped to see tree sparrows. Small flocks of birds darted across between the trees ahead of us. They were at once confidently identified by my companions: chaffinches, reed buntings and yellowhammers but no tree sparrows, although between 15 and 25 are now resident in this wetland, brought back by the establishment of the Cary Marsh nature reserve.
Streams have been diverted, ponds dug, and 60,000 reeds planted to make a reed bed. Shrubs and trees native to the area have been planted to create woodland, and a big field has been sown with crops that provide the winter forage that attracts the seed eaters: tree sparrows, yellowhammers and reed buntings among them. The reed bed, I was told, has successfully brought reed warblers to breed here, with 12 pairs in 2010, and a sighting of a juvenile water rail is proof that these secretive birds, too, have bred.
On Christmas morning, the roads were icy and impassable to traffic, and snow covered the frozen fields. Anxious about the birds' food source, my companions had trudged three miles to the reserve, their breath freezing in the temperature of -12C. It struck me that they were in the spirit of King Wenceslas and the page, though they were carrying not bread, wine or pine logs, but sacks of grain for the birds' breakfast. And grateful flocks swarmed in.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/22/country-diary-cary-marsh
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