THE SPARROW— FOR AND AGAINST. 49 
Six or seven martens’ nests are usually to be found under 
the eaves of this house, and unless I keep a very sharp look out 
the sparrows take them all. The martens build again and 
again, and when they do succeed in keeping their own the brood 
is sometimes so late that it perishes from the cold on leaving 
the nest. Surely this robbery ought not to be allowed, and the 
sparrows ought to be kept under. No “ farrago of fancy and 
fiction and forced facts ” is the book by Messrs. Gurney, Coues, 
and Russell, but sober truth, patiently gathered and carefully 
tabulated. 
Let no Selbornian be afraid to face the truth — the sparrow is 
in most places increasing rapidly, and in large numbers is in- 
compatible with other better and more beautiful birds. The 
hawks and the weasels are gone— they were present in Water- 
ton’s Park — and man, who banished them, must do their work. 
Aubrey Edwards. 
I reckon the sparrow among my friends, and nine-tenths of 
the charges brought against him are, according to my observa- 
tion, carried on since I was a boy of 12 years old— and I am now 
78 — are not founded on fact. Nothing can be more grotesquely 
funny to a man like myself, who has lived so long among them 
and their reputed victims, than the allegation that they drive 
away the martens. As to the other birds, alleged as victimised, the 
charge is too silly. The sand marten is just as scarce here as 
the house marten, in comparison with former times, and the 
swallow and swift more so still, and whatever reason there is for 
talking of the driving away of the house marten by the sparrow, 
it would be intensely difficult to prove that it did not hold good for 
the other three birds named also. One would think that any wise- 
acre might be aware that if a marten — and I am sure the total 
number is nothing like one per cent., even if one in five hundred 
— if dispossessed by the “ruffian ” sparrow of its nest, would be 
constrained by nature to go and build another elsewhere, and 
that being so, the total number of young martens of the year 
would not be diminished by reason of the buccaneering pro- 
pensities of the sparrow. As to which, I should not like to 
have to swear that I have ever seen half-a-dozen martens’ nests 
appropriated, whether as derelicts, or otherwise, by sparrows 
for nesting purposes, in all my time. 
J. C. Atkinson. 
Danhy in Cleveland. 
