THE ENGLISH SPAEEOW. 3I3 



martin boxes until the birds arrive. Once in possession they will 

 fight for their homes and sometimes succeed in keeping them. You 

 can only keep the house wren, however, by making the entrance to his 

 box too small to admit the sparrow. An opening the size of a silver 

 quarter is just right. 



A bulletin issued by the Dept. of Agriculture in 1901 on ''The 

 Relation of Sparrows to Agriculture," gives our own native sparrows 

 the credit of being much more helpful to man as destroyers of weed- 

 seed than the English sparrow, while at the same time they consume 

 a much smaller proportion of grain. In order to compare the grain- 

 eating propensities of the various species, nineteen specimens of 

 native birds, comprising song, field, chirping and grasshopper spar- 

 rows, were collected on a farm near Washington, D. C, about the 

 time for cutting grain. It was found that only two had eaten grain 

 and these only one kernel each, while five English sparrows taken 

 at the same time and place were each gorged with wheat. 



In summing up the report on this bird the author says : "There 

 is scarcely a grain crop which English sparrows do not habitually in- 

 jure; they pillage the fields by thousands and cause great damage. 

 There is little to be said in favor of the English sparrow. Its 

 insectivorous habits are creditable as far as they go, but they are 

 insignificant because the diet is almost exclusively vegetable ; and 

 while it is in the vegetable fare that the value of most sparrows 

 consists, yet in the case of the English sparrow the damage to 

 grain far over balances the benefit of weed-seed destruction. Add- 

 ing to this the injury it causes to buildings and statues in cities, there 

 is- no escape from the conclusion that the bird is a serious pest, the 

 extermination of which would be an unmixed blessing. 



"The obnoxious character of the English sparrow is widely 

 recognized, and numerous attempts, by means of bounties and 

 otherwise, have been made to rid the country of its presence but 

 with little success. The wariness of the bird, its hardihood, and its 

 prodigious fecundity have thus far rendered all such efl:orts futile." 



In 1899 a crusade against the sparrows was inaugurated in the 

 city of Boston through the efiforts of the American Society of Bird 

 • Restorers. The president of the society, ]\Ir. Fletcher Osgood, in 

 a letter, dated Xov. 27, 1902, says of this : "On Boston Common we 

 had about 600 pairs of sparrows breeding in holes in the trees. We 

 stopped up the nesting holes and by this means evicted about seven- 

 eighths of the sparrows. Last year not over eighty or ninety pairs 

 of sparrows bred on the Common. Our native birds have increased 

 in number in a most gratifying way since this eviction — this in 



