44 THE HOUSE SPARROW : 



Though originally a warm-country bird and sensitive to 

 cold, the sparrow knows but too well how to take care of 

 himself here, and, from his habits and knowledge where 

 best to find food at bad times, is much less liable to 

 starvation in frosty and snowy weather than other birds. 

 In the three severe winters, 1878-81, the ranks of most 

 common birds were so much thinned that it has taken 

 three or four mild winters to restore them to their usual 

 numbers, while the sparrows, so far as I saw, did not 

 become sensibly fewer. 



For my part, I beheve, and, so far as fifteen years' trial 

 goes, find it so, that we can do as well without sparrows 

 as without rats and cockroaches. If farmers destroy all 

 their own sparrows, they will "still suffer from the swarms 

 that come out from towns and villages. 



NOTE. 



It would be vain to expect people in general to exert themselves to 

 abate the nuisance, especially as sparrows are at least as cunning as 

 rats ; and the usual methods of netting are not very effective. What 

 we want is some plan which would enable one man to keep a village, 

 a very few a town, nearly free from sparrows. I think that I have 

 devised such a plan, on the principle of a decoy-pipe : it is not 

 worth while to describe this, before trying it. 



A few hints derived from long experience may be useful to any 

 one who wishes to investigate the food of sparrows himself. To 

 examine the food in an old sparrow the best plan is, if anything can be 

 felt in it, to take out the gullet. This can be done very quickly with 

 the fingers thus : open the feathers between the back and side of the 

 neck, and tear open the loose thin bare skin there ; this will expose 

 the wind-pipe and gullet. Having rubbed down from outside 

 any food near the mouth, take hold of and break off the upper end 

 of the gullet, pull out clear of skin and feathers, and then take hold 

 of and break off the lower end of the gullet. The food can now be 

 pressed out from the skin-bag, or this may be kept till convenient to 

 cut open. Sparrows killed just before they go to roost mostly have 

 their crops full ; their digestion is quick, and fittle or nothing is hkely 

 to be found in the crops of those caught at night at roost, or shot in 

 the morning. The food goes a little at a time into the gizzards of 

 old sparrows, and is there soon too much ground up to be worth 



