EVIDENCE. FROM EUROPEAN PUBLICATIONS. 347 



Iu gardens Sparrows do much mischief, as by feeding off young peas, eating green 

 peas from the pod^, stripping gooseberry bushes of their fruit-buds, destroying flowers, 

 etc. The question remains whether they do good enough in gardens to make up for 

 such misdeeds. Now, to prove that Sparrows are really useful, it is not enough to 

 show that they destroy some injurious insects, it must also be proved that, in their 

 absence, other birds would not destroy them, at least as effectually. This can be 

 found out only in one way — by banishing the Sparrows from a place for some years. 

 My object iu letting no Sparrows live about my house, buildings, and gardens, has 

 been not only to protect the martins (perhaps it would be enough for this to kill those 

 Sparrows only which go near their nests), but also to get a better test of the utility 

 of S^) arrows thau could otherwise be got by any amount of examination of the food 

 in them. My place is a fair specimen of the country, having flower and kitchen gar- 

 dens, shrubberies, and small orchard, surrounded by meadows, with corn fields within 

 easy reach all round. All birds except Sparrows have been let alone there. 



Sparrows having bceu almost entirely absent for many years, if they took insects 

 which other birds do not, such insects would have become very numerous, and the 

 food in Sparrows killed there would show this. Now, it has been quite as unusual to 

 find au insect in an old Sparrow there as elsewhere. Fifty old Sparrows and young 

 ones which could feed themselves were killed one summer about my buildings and 

 garden, with food in their crops. This food, carefully examined (as in all cases with 

 a lens), was found to be corn, milky, green, and ripe, and sometimes green peas from 

 my garden; only two small insects were found in the whole number. The food in 

 them has been much the same every year. Examining the old birds, however, is not 

 test enough, a3 they eat very few insects anywhere ; but if any were the peculiar 

 prey of Sparrows, they would be found in quantity in any young ones bred about my 

 place. To test this, when a pair or two of Sparrows, as happens most years, contrive, 

 by keeping clear of the buildings, to escape being shot long enough to build a nest 

 and hatch young ones, these have been taken (by choice when about half grown), 

 and the food in them carefully examined. It has varied greatly, but certainly there 

 were not more insects among it, I think less than there usually are where Sparrows 

 abound. Iu the only nest known of one year the food in the four young ones was 

 chiefly green peas, with some grains of green wheat, one small beetle, and some half 

 dozen small insects of species unknown to me. In the only nest the following year 

 the young ones had little in them except corn — old wheat, if I remember rightly. 

 Some broods have contained small beetles (which, mostly soft ones, I have found in 

 Sparrows old and young, from all sorts of places, oftener than caterpillars) and a few 

 wild seeds. One brood had a mixture of beetles and ripe wheat. One grasshopper's 

 leg and a very few pieces of earwigs have also been found. Of caterpillars, said to be 

 kept down by Sparrows, only two small ones in eight callow birds, from two nests 

 taken at the same time, have been found in all the years that these nestlings have 

 been examined, and no trace of an aphis. The absence of caterpillars is the only dif 

 ference that I have noticed in the character of the insect-food in the young Sparrows 

 at my place and elsewhere. On the whole, the deduction from the food-test during 

 fifteen years seems to be that the Sparrows are useless, and that the insects which 

 would be given to their young by them if they were allowed to live in numbers about 

 my premises would be so mnch food taken, when they most want it, from better birds 

 which live entirely, or nearly so, on insects, and thus keep them, especially caterpil- 

 lars, down so effectively in the absence of Sparrows that, when a chance pair of these 

 come and build, there are few of their favorite sorts for them. 



[The Guardian, Manchester, England, January 30, 1888.] 

 ENORMOUS DESTRUCTION OF SPARROWS IN CHESHIRE. 



At the annual meeting of the Cheshire Farmers' Club on Saturday evening, the 

 chairman, Mr. John Roberts, the largest tenant-farmer on the Hawarden estate, re- 

 ferred to the havoc wrought by the common House Sparrow among grain crops, and 



