4 U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 211 



much faster than the starling, and its occupation was substantially 

 completed forty years after its introduction. The starling spread is 

 still far from finished fifty years after its introduction." The rapid 

 spread of the sparrow is largely due to the fact that it was much more 

 widely introduced and artificially transplanted. Being largely a 

 grain-eating bird, it traveled extensively from place to place along 

 the highways, where it could pick up waste grain dropped by passing 

 vehicles and find some semidigested grain in the droppings of horses. 

 Undoubtedly many found their way to more distant places by securing 

 unintentional transportation in grain cars or cattle cars, as shown by 

 the fact that towns and cities along the principal railway lines, 

 especially where there has been heavy traffic in grain, have been the 

 first communities occupied. When these places have become over- 

 crowded, the birds have spread out into the surrounding rural or 

 suburban regions. 



At the peak of its abundance, during the early part of this century, 

 the English sparrow was undoubtedly the most abundant bird in the 

 United States, except in heavily forested, alpine, and desert regions. 

 Within its favorite haunts one could easily see twice as many sparrows 

 as all other birds combined. Mrs. Nice (1931) says: "The English 

 or House Sparrow appears to be the most abundant breeding bird in 

 Oklahoma. On 1,166 miles of 'roadside censuses' taken in May, 

 June, and early July, 1920-1923, in all sections of the state, we counted 

 2,055 of these birds; this was 26 percent of all the birds seen and twice 

 as many as the most common native bird — the Dickcissel." 



Tilford Moore tells me that in his counts in St. Paul, Minn., he 

 recorded 42 English sparrows to 20 other birds. On the other hand, 

 Wing (1943) estimates that in the Eastern States these sparrows con- 

 stitute about 3 percent of the breeding bird population and about 4.5 

 percent of the wintering bird population. If this is true today, there 

 has been a marked decrease in the East during the past two decades; 

 and this is quite evident to the casual observer. 



The decrease is most marked in the Eastern States, especially in the 

 cities and towns, though the sparrows are still common in the rural 

 districts, about the farmyards and poultry farms, where there is still 

 plenty of grain being fed to livestock. The vast hordes that formerly 

 roosted in the trees of the King's Chapel and Granary burying grounds, 

 in the center of the city of Boston, are no more, though a few may 

 still be found in the public parks, where the pigeons seem to find some 

 food. Warren F. Eaton (1924), then of Weston, Mass., published 

 some interesting data showing the decline in the numbers of these 

 sparrows in eastern Massachusetts, between 1914 and 1922. The 

 number of days on which the sparrows were seen declined from 232 in 

 1916 to 101 in 1922; and the total number of sparrows seen declined 



