106 THE BIRDS OF SHERWOOD FOREST. 



the average yearly progeny of a pair of sparrows 

 amounts to fourteen, goes on to say : " It is surprising 

 that farmers should be so little interested on this matter ; 

 surely they cannot be aware that the little feathered 

 tribe claim a tithe of their land's produce. The daily 

 consumption of small birds is computed to be, in weight, 

 one-sixih of their own bodies, and allowing the average 

 weight of sparrows to be one ounce avoirdupois '* 

 (which, by-the-bye, is too high), "the consumption 

 of 100 would be 6083 oz., or nearly 3J cwt. for 

 the year. Supposing, further, that every hundred 

 acres of land contained 1000 sparrows, their yearly con- 

 sumption would be, according to the preceding theory, 

 60,830 oz., or nearly 34 J cwt/' 



Now, undoubtedly, the consumption of this quantity 

 of wheat or other corn would indeed be a serious matter, 

 and if corn was the exclusive food of the sparrow, then 

 something might be said in favour of his destruction. 

 But we must not condemn him without hearing his own 

 witnesses as well as those of his enemies. In the 

 Zoologist, page 2349, Mr. Hawley of Doncaster writes 

 that he has repeatedly watched sparrows feeding their 

 young, and has found that on the average they bring 

 food to the nest once in ten minutes for six hours out 

 of the twenty-four, each time bringing from two to six 

 caterpillars. He goes on to say, "Now suppose the 

 * three thousand five hundred sparrows'" (alluding to 

 an association which had destroyed that number in a 

 year), " were to have been alive the next spring, each 

 pair to have built a nest, and reared successive broods of 

 young during three months, we have, at the rate of 

 252,000 per day, the enormous multitude of 21,168,000 

 larvaB prevented from destroying the products of the 



