'A blessing or a nuisance?'

Everyone's had an opinion about the polarizing English Sparrow.

TWiB photo illustration.

As I was contemplating this piece, a missive came across from the artist/actor Tony Fitzpatrick about sparrows. This was in light of the subject matter of his recent collages. He wrote:

Several birders have reached out to me wondering why I’m lavishing so much attention on “invasive species” like Sparrows. Actually only a few kinds of Sparrows are “invasive species”— the rest are natives. Some Birders feel like Sparrows chase the sexier birds away by stealing their nests, killing their chicks, and basically behaving like Nature’s pirates. This is true. The most successful species are intensely fierce about staying in the world. Propagating their species. For all of the warm and fuzzy nature Tik-Toks and Reels out there on the internet?

It’s important to remember that Nature is largely around-the-clock murder. There is no right or wrong — merely consequences.

Yes, as Fitzpatrick mentioned to me, he’s been making “a whole mess of” sparrows lately:

Some of Fitzpatrick’s recent works.

So, sparrows do evoke some strong feelings now. But it’s nothing like back in the late 19th century. As I wrote about last week, the “Sparrow War” raged for decades after their introduction into the United States in the 1850s. Sparrows were one of the first orders of business for the newly formed American Ornithologists’ Union in 1883. When we see a House Sparrow in our backyards now, perhaps our thoughts can drift toward that time period.

Attitudes evolved as the English Sparrow spread across the United States. This can be seen in the estimable outdoors publication Forest and Stream. In an 1877 piece, three correspondents gave voice to a positive view of the sparrow. In “A blessing or a nuisance?” writers made the case mostly for the sparrow. Thomas Mayo Brewer was an eminent ornithologist, friend of John James Audubon, and co-author of the famed History of North American Birds. He posed a number of somewhat rhetorical questions to Boston’s city forester, John Galvin. In what might have been a pro-sparrow setup, Galvin then attested to the sparrows’ efficacy at gobbling up caterpillars from the large elms on Boston Common. Then he went on to say “without hesitation, the sparrows do not molest or interfere with any other bird,” countering long-standing claims that the birds were particularly aggressive toward robins and bluebirds.¹ What might have been a hedge toward a pro-sparrow stance, Forest and Stream went on to say that further study of sparrow populations would be necessary.

That was essentially the case when the newly founded AOU made English Sparrows a priority during the union’s first meeting a few years later. Like many an organization facing a thorny issue, they appointed a committee to study the problem and come back with recommendations. When those recommendations came, and showed that the sparrows were indeed a problem “in all respects a most undesirable addition to our fauna,” Forest and Stream posited that protections for sparrow-eating species like shrikes and screech-owls might be a solution. More shrikes and owls would result in fewer sparrows. It was a forward-thinking approach.

But by 1890, in a piece titled “The Pestiferous Sparrow,” the editors, perhaps exhausted after writing about Passer domesticus for decades, came out strongly for methods that would destroy the birds, while acknowledging that eradication at “this late date might be in vain.” They sang the praises of an effort in New York City that did remove some sparrows and resulted in the return of native birds.

Boston was sort of ground zero in the Sparrow War. Brewer, who died in 1880, was a Bostonian, but it was the Massachusetts legislature that passed a well-known anti-sparrow law in 1890. The law would have “special officers” hunt the sparrows, though at least a year later “nothing had come of it.” It appears Massachusetts wasn’t one of the states to enact destructive bird bounty laws in the 1890s. So perhaps more humane approaches prevailed.

With this quick look back at the Sparrow War, it’s hard to decipher who won or lost among the humans on both sides. But maybe the sparrows were the big winners. By 1900, they had spread all the way across the United States to the West Coast, and of course they are ubiquitous wherever human habitation may be found today.

As a coda for this piece, I decided to look up what Angelia Kumlien Main had to say about the species. You might remember Ms. Main—author of 1925’s Bird Companions. Hers was a more personal sort of bird book, and in that way it is wonderfully approachable and accessible to novices and experts alike. It also came a little after the thick of the Sparrow War.

In her entry on the English Sparrow, she goes on at length about these “quarrelsome nuisances.” But then she turns to the sparrow’s persistence and cleverness. As I shared earlier in Tony Fitzpatrick’s words, “The most successful species are intensely fierce about staying in the world. Propagating their species.”

Here is what Ms. Main had to say, with a little invective as well:

But, in spite of our hatred and prejudice, we must admit that these unclean mite-carriers, vulgar, noisy hoodlums, that they are, present examples worthy of imitation. I think their motto, if they have one, is “Never give up.” If their nests are taken from the trees by the half dozen, do they abandon the tree? No; they only build a little higher the next time. If the eggs are taken out, one by one, does the mother bird cease to lay? No, but keeps on into the summer, like a biddy. Do they forsake this climate as soon as it turns cold? No. Thirty degrees below zero does not daunt them in the least. The year (1914) by the middle of February they began nesting. They are of untiring domestic habits, raising each season three and four families of from five to seven little ones. Did birds ever better accommodate themselves to circumstances or accept their lot with more cheerfulness?

Last summer, this writer was seated in an outdoor cafe in central Europe. We had just received our schnitzels and pommes frites and were enjoying the sunshine and idyllic surroundings. Every so often, a House Sparrow would approach our table, and one time, in a brief pause between bites, the bird boldly snatched up one of the frites and flew off with it.

House Sparrows are not birds that anyone is going to seek out or celebrate. But most anyone who enjoys and appreciates birds can admire their tenacity.

The Sparrow War has echoes of battles against non-native species now. And it may be instructive for how we engage with flora and fauna that might not be “meant” to be here, but in the end results in acceptance and co-existence.

A male House Sparrow sits on a bird feeder in a back yard in Chicago.

1. In reality, House Sparrows sometimes evict other birds from nest holes, including Eastern Bluebirds, Purple Martins, and Tree Swallows.