London gardens have always been full of Beatrix Potter wildlife - understated, undersized things like brown sparrows, brown garden mice, blackbirds, thrushes, a fuzzy bat at night and the occasional grey squirrel.
We often read now that these chirpy Cockney creatures are endangered. The city's sparrow population shrank 59 per cent between 1994 and 2000. The living's not easy for city hedgehogs, hemmed in by thundering roads, or bats, made homeless by modern houses with no roof holes for nesting. It's easy to think that our selfish urban ways are killing off all the other species in Britain's biggest city space, and that we humans will soon be left in a concrete desert with only ourselves for company.
Ourselves and the pests, that is. Urban foxes in the bamboo hedge. Rats in the undergrowth, ready to make a dash for the back door. (With one for every person in the British isles, it's truer than ever that a rat is probably never more than a few feet away.)
The idea of sharing space with these animals might not be reassuring. But at least you know what you’re seeing. But what if you saw wild deer chomping at your clematis - or a green parakeet?
A parakeet swooped over my head at Hampton Court Palace the other day. I blinked, thinking it must be a trick of the light. But when I opened my eyes it was still green and squawking. Now admittedly the splendidly artificial formal garden, full of rare black tulips and false rivers and yew trees clipped into giant cones, is just the kind of place where you'd expect to see peacocks or pink elephants. But the Beefeater assured me, "Those parakeets are wild."
I didn't really believe him. But when I went for lunch in suburban Twickenham, there were dozens more, swooping and screeching between the pebbledash houses. "They're the bird I see most out of the window all day," said my friend Patrick. "Give it a few years and I think they'll be the top bird in London."
Feral green parakeets, it turns out, have been breeding around the London suburbs since the 1970s. A study published last year by Oxford biologist Christ Butler suggests Britain's feral parakeet population is growing by 30 per cent a year and will hit 100,000 by 2010. There are already 10,000 in London. They're commonest south of the river, where you can now see emerald flocks in practically every tree.
But they're spreading north and east too. I don't know whether I believe my husband when he says he's always seeing them on Hampstead Heath, but birdwatchers have logged three sightings in East London in 2005.
As for deer, the idea that they might be roaming the streets of the capital seems even more bizarre. Yet there are regular sightings in the woods of Havering, Hillingdon, Bromley and Waltham Forest. There have even been reports of deer at Sydenham Hill Wood in Southwark and Tooting Bec Common in Wandsworth. The one best adapted to London life is the small, solitary, secretive muntjac, which has tiny antlers, a glossy red-brown coat, white patches on its thighs and canine teeth that stick out so far from under its top lip that they look like tusks. Muntjac love the food that comes from suburban gardens and allotments: honeysuckle and clematis, bramble, roses, ivy, clematis, peas, beans and bluebells. And, like the parakeets, they have no predators here. They've probably come to stay.
Exotic and beautiful though both newcomers to our rather unexotic city are, many grumbling Londoners are already beginning to think of them as pests, in the same grudging way many Londoners think of the latest human immigrants - Somalis, say, or eastern Europeans. Conservationists worry that the deer have too much of a taste for fresh shoots and could mess up their tree preservation programmes. And the noisy parrots, with their big ugly nests, might be better at feeding than native birds, and squeeze them out of the food chain - both in town and in the country, where they've started to tuck into commercial fruit orchards.
Yet both new species have entered the city only because of Londoners’ curiosity and instinct for exploration - the human qualities that make it interesting to live in the city. The parakeets are natives of India and sub-Saharan Africa. Their origin in London is lost in urban myth. Some say they escaped from a quarantine holding at Heathrow, some that they escaped from an exotic film set in Shepperton Studios, though the likeliest story is that they escaped from homes or pet shops. Muntjac deer, introduced from China in the 19th century, escaped from Woburn Park in the 1920s. London wouldn't be London - a magnet for all life forms - if new ways and forms of life didn't keep arriving and getting mixed up with familiar things.
Beatrix Potter might be astonished at the creatures inhabiting London's green patches today. But if you accept them as weird by-products of our ancestors’ imperial explorations, and the globalisation which is its contemporary equivalent, you might stop having Michael Howard moments of panic about immigration and simply start enjoying the fact that the urban jungle is becoming a jungle.
I'm looking forward to seeing muntjac deer nibbling at the nasturtiums in my backyard.
