330 THE ENGLISH SPARROW IN AMERICA. 



TESTIMONY EELATING MAINLY TO TEE SPAEEOW IN EUEOPE. 



FROM THE EVIDENCE SUBMITTED TO THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON [BRITISH] WILD 



BIRDS PROTECTION. 1873. 



Tilr. Champion Russell, residence near Romford.] 



[Page 12.] I will give you a history of the course of his life the whole of the year 

 rouud in the country. We will begin on the 1st of January. He lives in the farm- 

 yards, along the roads, yards of any kind near the houses. He gets his food there ; 

 when the stacks have been threshed, in he goes. As soon as the barley and oats are 

 sown he leaves the farm-yards and houses, and you see very few there. If you shoot 

 him in the fields you find his crop full of oats and barley, unless he can get wheat ; 

 then from that time until after the seed corn has grown, which would be about the 

 end of April (it depends on the season), through May and June, when he can get the 

 least corn,* then he destroys insects; the old ones eat scarcely any even at this time, 

 but they feed their young more or less with them. Then when the green peas are in 

 pod, that is about the first thing he takes in the fields. At this time of the year you 

 may go miles across the country without seeing a Sparrow in the fields at all, except 

 near hoases and roads. I never see a Sparrow elsewhere until the peas are in pod. 

 The next is the oats and barley, when they begin to get milky, and the next thing is 

 the wheat. They get more and more in the fields in flocks, and there they stop, living 

 principally in the fields, and many of them sleeping out in the hedges, until all the 

 waste corn on the ground has grown in October. Then they come in clouds round 

 the stacks, and then they go back to their old occupation, picking up what they can 

 among the fowls and pigs and on the roads. The chief mischief they do is eating 

 the green wheat in the ear when the corn just begins to form and there is very little 

 in it. An intelligent farmer told me lately that he sometimes loses £15 or £20 a 

 year on a field, and that he would give £20 a year to keep them out ; he lives near a 

 village. 



This is done particularly in the first half of July, when the grain is imperfect ; the 

 juice runs out of their mouths when shot ; you would think they had been drinking 

 milk. Some farmers in Norfolk sow a little strip of oats between the farm-yard and the 

 wheat-field that they may attack them first. But the great objection which I have 

 to the Sparrows is, that they are by their increasing numbers exterminating the mar- 

 tins. They have a habit of dispossessing the martins of their nests, and in our part 

 of the country the martins have almost disappeared; consequently, we are subject 

 to a plague of flies and insects; the Sparrows are the best allies of flying insects. 



I see an attempt to dispossess the martins on an average about twice a week when 

 I am at home ; and once or twice I have seen it two or three times in a day. The 

 martins' nests are under the eaves. The cock Sparrow comes first and settles on the 

 eaves, and dodges about ; the martins make feeble attempts to drive them away, but 

 they are usually perfectly helpless ; the Sparrow dodges backward and forward per- 

 haps for an hour ; at last he gets in, and once into the nest the cock stops in and 

 keeps the martins out with his sharp bill, while the hen brings some hay. The Spar- 

 row once in full possession the martins never meddle. They spend the whole of the 

 summer in building fresh nests for the Sparrows. 



I never knew that they dispossessed any other bird. 



I never knew any other bird dispossess the martins. 



The Sparrows come in clouds round the stacks when they can get no more out of 

 the fields, and they then take to the same mode of life that we began with, except 

 that they have a turn at the wheat in the fields when it is sowed about November. 

 The stacks being threshed out in the fields has made a difference to them ; they 

 used to thresh them out in the farm-yard, where they had a struggle with the pigs 

 and fowls. Close to my gate at home, though not on my own land, a stack was 



* [It should be remembered that the word corn is used in England to denote small 

 grain of almost any kind; Indian corn is invariably called maize.— W. B. B.] 



