SPARROWS AND SWALLOWS
Poor little brown immigrants, how many enemies and how few friends they
have, and yet what have they done to deserve so hard a fate? Merely
following out the biblical instruction to multiply and increase--they
always remind me of true Anglo-Saxon stock. They protect the family,
they fight all strangers and, “Colonize, colonize,” is their motto.
I have had quite an extensive acquaintance with the English sparrow,
both in town and in the country, and I think that this bad boy of the
air has a worse name than he deserves. Undoubtedly he is bad; so are
all boys, and all birds, and all men and women. We want supervision,
correction, restriction--but the sparrow has good points.
Sparrow mothers lead all birds in mothering, as far as my observation
goes. Again and again I have put a baby sparrow on the roof. He is a
stranger picked up in the street. I do not know what nest he comes
from, he does not know, no one knows. He is like the poor dog in the
express car on a certain railway that ate up his tag. No one knew what
place he was bound for.
Well, the instant the lost sparrow opens his little beak and gives a
cry of distress, three or four mother sparrows come flying toward him
with their beaks full of food. They don’t wait to see whose baby he is,
as some human mothers would wait. He is a baby, and he is hungry, and
they are going to feed him, and they do it until he flutters from the
roof, and I have to pick him up and take care of him myself. If I put
him in a cage and set him back on the roof, the street sparrows will
try all day long to feed him through the bars. Yes, indeed, a mother
sparrow is the best mother bird I know.
I have never tried them with the young of other birds, but I have tried
their young with canaries. My canaries are the dearest and best of
parents to their own nestlings, but none of them will feed the babies
of other canaries. As for young robins, yellow warblers, finches, and
sparrows, they utterly ignore them, unless they have particularly
piercing voices. In these cases the canaries grow nervous and stuff
their own young ones as if they thought the cries of distress issued
from their throats.
Once I saw a canary hitch up to a young sparrow and look down its
throat. He then shook his crest and hopped away, as if to say, “I could
never fill that cavity.” Two summers ago I put a demure, well-behaved
young sparrow baby into a cage of German canaries. She hopped into the
nest, settled her little gray body down among the four yellow birds,
and unheeding the mother’s impatient pushes and shrugs, sat there till
she grew old enough to take to a perch. After a time I took her out
of the cage and put her on the veranda. She played there all day, but
every night she came in to sleep near the canaries.
I knew she was in the room, for she flew out every morning when I
opened the screen-door, but where was her sleeping-place? I looked high
and low, but could not find her for a long time, until late one night,
when I was saying, “I wonder where that bird is?” I saw something move
slightly on the top of the canaries’ cage. A sheet was thrown over it,
and under the sheet was the smallest and flattest projection. I laughed
as I looked at it, and said, “I have found it at last.”
Every night this quaint little sparrow, Judy by name, had crawled
up under the sheet and had slept on the wires of the cage, over her
foster-mother and the young canaries. It was a very uncomfortable
sleeping-place, and after I found her out she never used it again, but
took to a box on the wall near a mirror. There she sat calmly gazing at
me night after night as I held up the light to look at her.
She was so interesting that I could not let her go. She seems to
recognize a certain kinship with the street sparrows, for she chirps
excitedly to them, but she does not care to go out with them, and has
chosen for a mate a widowed Java sparrow, who is not so devoted to her
as she is to him. He is good to her, however, and flies about with
her, but she does all the nest-making. This summer she had a curious
structure of straw among some fir branches that she kept adding to,
until it was over a foot long. For some months she laid eggs in the
middle of this nest. Occasionally I took out a few and gave them to the
other birds to eat, but when I lifted the nest down this autumn there
were still a dozen in it.
I was sorry she had been too flighty to rear some Java and English
sparrow-hybrids. They would have been most interesting. Perhaps she
will have more steadiness next summer. I used to be amused with her at
breakfast-time. She would lean far out of her nest to see what I was
giving to the other birds, then with a joyful sound to her mate that
sounded like, “O Java,” she would fly down to investigate.
One sparrow I had, learned to sing some of the notes of the Brazil
cardinal. The cardinal hated him and beat him frequently, but the
sparrow followed him from place to place, and practised his little
tune till it was becoming quite perfect. A sparrow is said to have a
good vocal apparatus, and I suppose there is no reason why he should
not sing if he wants to. Unfortunately, I put this bird out of the
aviary, and I have never heard him sing again. Perhaps the birds in the
street shamed him out of it.
My sparrows have mostly been good sparrows, and as a class have not
been greater fighters than other birds. I have observed them in the
aviary and out of it, and have rarely seen them chase or annoy smaller
birds. In the city, goldfinches, robins, some warblers, purple finches,
and song-sparrows came about the roof-veranda, and talked to the birds
inside the netting, and sometimes my canaries go out and fly about, but
the sparrows never interfere with them.
On my farm the sparrows were equally good. They never injured the
tiny wild birds that came for food, but fed peaceably with them. On
neighboring farms sparrows were known to tear swallows’ nests to
pieces, but they never molested my swallows, though they built close to
our house doors. I think possibly the reason lay in the abundance of
food scattered about. The little rogues knew that there was enough for
them summer and winter. They understood that I liked them, and they did
not harm my other pets.
They are most intelligent birds. Living by their wits has developed
them amazingly. In Paris I used to be interested with their
discrimination in the matter of making friends. An elderly man who fed
a flock in the Tuileries Gardens had gained the confidence of every
member of it. They would not come to strangers, but when he called
“Jeanne! Pierre!” and the rest of their names, each bird would fly to
him in turn.
I had a great affection for the skimming swallows about my farm, and
often watched them as they caught flies or went to the low ground for
mud for their interesting nests. I was very sorry to find that many of
these graceful swallows suffered as much from parasites as other wild
birds I had known.
One case, on a farm near me, was quite painful for the sufferers. A
window in a carriage-house loft had been left open, and a pair of
old swallows, finding the rafters a secluded place, built a fine mud
nest against them. When the young ones were hatched they were visited
every day by the farmer’s wife, who grieved to find them attacked
by fat worms that mostly crawled into their ears. These worms were
half an inch long, had no hair, but possessed rudimentary feet like
a caterpillar’s, that were only visible under a microscope. One worm
penetrated a young bird’s nostril so far that only a tiny piece of
his body was visible. Enough remained in sight to seize upon, but his
forced exit from the nostril was followed by a gush of blood. The sore
place soon got well, and the other young swallows also recovered after
their ears were cleaned out.
The kind-hearted mistress of the farm destroyed this mud nest, made a
new one of excelsior and wool, put the little swallows in it, and the
parents, far from being frightened by this radical change in their
environment, went on feeding their young ones, conducted them out into
the world beyond the carriage house, and came back the next year to
nest in the same place.
Two stories about the swallows interested me greatly. The first one was
to the effect that the robin was the bird who undertook to teach the
first swallow created how to build a nest. I could imagine the fussy,
nervous robin entering upon the task with great haste, and it is said
that she very quickly got out of patience. Every time she opened her
beak to tell the swallow how to choose her mud and sticks, and how to
shape the nest, the intelligent bird would say, “I know that; I know
that.” At last, and unfortunately when the nest was only half finished,
the robin became exasperated and flew away, and from that day to this
every swallow has to be content with a partial home that often falls to
pieces.
The second story was a Swedish one, and relates that when the crucified
Christ hung on the cross, a swallow kept flying back and forth crying,
“Svala! svala!”--comfort, comfort!
I do not believe in the increase of sparrows, and yet I bring up a
certain number of them every year. How can I refuse the children who
come to me with the tiny birds and say, “This is our sparrow, please
feed him. We will call in a few days to see how he is.”
“Children,” I often say falteringly, “if this is a sick sparrow, you
won’t blame me if I chloroform him?”
“Oh, no,” they always cheerfully reply, but unfortunately the sparrow
is rarely a sick sparrow. He is usually in the best of health, and he
opens his yellow-rimmed beak and stares trustingly at me, and after
I give him one meal my fate is sealed. I am nurse-in-chief for many
days, though a young sparrow, of all my birds, learns soonest to feed
himself. Life is sacred in the eyes of children, and the way to get rid
of sparrows is not by inciting boys and girls to destroy them.
The whole department of bird and animal life should be under
supervision. We have too many cats and dogs, too many sparrows and
pigeons in our cities. The health of the citizens is the first
consideration. Each city should maintain bird-houses, and bird
reservations. If I can raise shy birds on a city veranda, why could not
more wild birds be raised in bird-houses in public gardens and parks?
It would not be an easy matter to thin out the sparrows, or utterly to
destroy them, but it could be done, and our wild birds could be enticed
back, and less money and time be spent in fighting insect pests. The
birds’ little beaks will do more effective work than all our spraying
and tree-climbing.
It must amuse the birds immensely to see big, clumsy mankind trying
to ferret out the gipsy moth, for example. The sparrows do eat some
insects’ eggs and larvæ, for I have seen them do it inside and outside
my aviary--but it is a hopeless task to try to defend these poor
little fellows--these “avian rats,” these “cosmopolitan pests,” as
ornithologists call them. I cannot dislike them nor call them names.
They are brave little birds, and when I throw open my window on a cold
winter morning, and see them waiting on the opposite roofs for their
breakfast, and reflect that they alone of all the summer birds are left
to us in the city, I cannot deal harshly with them.
Under a certain tree, is emptied each day a certain amount of grain, no
more no less, and it is put there whether I am at home or not. Birds
like to know what to depend on. They don’t want to be fed spasmodically
any more than we do. All day the sparrows flutter about the house.
As far as I can make out we have a flock of sixty or seventy in our
neighborhood. When night comes they tuck themselves away under the
house-eaves, getting near the chimneys if they can. When the time comes
to exterminate them I will help. In the meantime I do not see what good
it would do to carry on an unsystematic and shocking killing of the
helpless young ones--the pets of my children friends.
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