The Birds and Poets 227 



"Indeed, a great deal of nonsense is talked about 

 sparrows driving away other birds. Like the down- 

 trodden Italian and other peasants from the Old 

 World, the sparrows are prepared to live here where 

 others would starve. They kill no birds. We are 

 too wont to attribute the results of our own misdeeds 

 or shortcomings — the barbarities of millinery fashions, 

 wanton slaughter masquerading as sport, the lack of 

 good bird laws and the enforcing of them, where such 

 exist — upon these troublesome, noisy, quarrelsome little 

 feathered gamins * * *. In spite of the sparrows, 

 there is already noticeable a large increase in the num- 

 ber of song birds wherever protective laws, reinforced 

 by Audubon Societies and public sentiment have oper- 

 ated for even a few years. Sparrows drive no birds 

 from England." 



I know full well that the English sparrow's 

 record is not all white. He is an untidy little 

 buster, and he has been the subject of inquiry by 

 the United States Government, and the statistics 

 show him to be a heavy destroyer of grain, beans, 

 fruit, etc., in certain localities. But what shall 

 we say of the bobolinks that annually eat thousands 

 of pounds of rice, and of the robins that often 

 devastate cherry, olive and other fruit crops, to 

 say nothing of the blue jays, blackbirds, crows 

 et al., all of whom enjoy faii;ly respectable repu- 

 tations? It has sometimes only been possible to 

 save the California olive crop from the hungry 

 robins by the most prompt and vigorous action.* 



* Farmers' Birl. 513, p. 7, U.. S. Dept. of Agr. 



