Drummond. — On Introduced Birds. 



235 



place, where an experiment was made, egg after egg was removed 

 until fifty from one bird had been counted. 



At Temuka, four broods of young, totalling thirteen birds, 

 have been hatched in one nest, and in quick succession. In 

 the Waikato district, four broods of five birds each are quite 

 €ommon. Mr. W. Hooton, secretary of the Farmers' Union 

 at Rangi-iwi, in the Waikato, states that sparrows there gene- 

 rally breed four times in the season. In North Tauranga, on 

 the east coast of the North Island, three broods of six each are 

 common. At Balcairn, Woodside, and West Taieri, in the South 

 Island, the reports state there are three broods in the season. 

 Mr. W. Harding, chairman of the Ashburton branch of the 

 Farmers' Union, gives the number in his district as thirty-five, 

 which is also the number given by the Ashburton County Council. 

 Mr. A. H. Shury, of Ashburton, says that a pair will rear five 

 1) roods of five birds each, and the first brood will rear at least one. 



Mr. James Smaill, an observer at Inch-Clutha, in Otago, says 

 that breeding goes on all through the season, whole nestfuls 

 being killed off by the cold in the severe weather. From twenty- 

 five to thirty are the figures supplied for West Oxford, and at 

 Riccarton there have been recorded three broods of five each. 

 In a nest under a verandah the unfledged young ones evidently 

 helped in the hatching of the eggs, so that the nest was never 

 empty of unfledged young, while fully fledged birds seemed to rise 

 out of the nest uninterruptedly right through the season. 



From the nature of the evidence submitted, I should say that 

 twenty-five young is a fair average for one pair in one season. 



If allowance is made for natural decrease, which certainly 

 ■cannot be very great in the case of the sparrow, the average 

 might safely be put down at twenty. I feel sure that that is 

 well within the mark. If those twenty were equally divided 

 into males and females, and if all of them, together with the 

 original parent birds, lived for five years, the single pair in that 

 time would have increased to no fewer than 322,102. The in- 

 crease is shown by the following table : — 



