BIRDS OF INDIA DEWAR. 633 



abundant as in England. If the question : Friend or foe ? were 

 determined by votes, I fear that the pushing little fellow would be 

 condemned by a large majoritj^, but I am not at all sure that his con- 

 demnation would be just. 



We must bear in mind that the sparrow, as his scientific name. 

 Passer domesticus^ suggests, is a bird of towns rather than of the open 

 country. Now, a town sparrow can not do much damage to the crops, 

 unless, of course (as many London sparrows are said to do), he takes 

 a holiday in the country at the time when the corn is ripening ! 



SPARROW NESTLINGS. 



We must not forget that young sparrows in the nest are fed chiefly 

 on insect food. Last j^ear I placed in a cage in the veranda some 

 baby sparrows taken out of a nest in the pantry of my bungalow. 

 The parents soon found them out, and fed them through the bars of 

 the cage. I was able to satisfy myself that the young were fed 

 largely on green caterpillars, which I believe were captured in the 

 kitchen garden. In each beakful of food carried to the young bird 

 there were not less than three of these caterpillars. By watching the 

 number of times food was taken to the cage, I calculated that the hen, 

 for she does the lion's share of the feeding, brought in something like 

 540 insects (chiefly caterpillars) per diem to her brood. She fed 

 them on this diet for nearly three weeks, so that the young ones before 

 leaving the nest had swallowed between them several thousands of 

 caterpillars. 



Now, we know that the rearing of a family seems to be the normal 

 condition of a sparrow, so that this species performs a very great 

 service to man in the form of insect destruction. Further, the adult 

 birds sometimes eat insects, and this they are likely to do whenever, 

 from some cause or other, insects become unusually abundant, that is 

 to say, precisely at the time when it is most important to man that his 

 little six-legged foes should be devoured. As a set-off to this we must 

 not forget the large amount of food grains that sparrows devour. 

 Moreover, were they less numerous, their place might perhaps be 

 taken by birds of more undoubted utility to man. Probably the only 

 method of arriving at the truth as regards the sparrow is to ex- 

 terminate him completely from a given locality, and watch the results. 

 This, I believe, was done about forty years ago in Maine and Auxerre, 

 with the result that almost every green leaf was destroyed by cater- 

 pillars in the following year. 



It is thus obvious that the determination of the economic value of 

 some birds is not by any means a simple matter. One thing is cer- 

 tain, and that is that no bird should be condemned as an enemy of 

 man until a prolonged and careful inquiry into its habits has been 

 made. 



