SPARROWS. 
41 
most quarrelsome pest, and they render, so far as I have been able to 
ascertain, not the very slightest service.* 
“ They prevent the increase of Swallows, and have literally driven 
all our soft-billed insect-eating birds from our gardens and orchards. 
The Flycatcher has gone ; the Tree Creeper, the Peep, the Minor 
Warblers, most of which lived on the eggs of moths and butterflies, I 
have not this year seen a specimen of; whilst the grub in the Celery 
increases year by year, and the teeming thousands of Daddy Longlegs, 
and all kinds of moths and butterflies, give a pretty correct warning 
of what we may expect next year.” 
The presence of the insect-pests mentioned above depends also 
on other circumstances besides amount of bird-presence ; but to return 
to the Sparrow question. Mr. E. Lowe gives the following observation 
from examination:— 
“ Seen following the plough, they were found to be feeding upon 
Turnip-seed that had not vegetated ; seen upon the young Barley, 
they were found to be eating Eed Clover and Trefoil-seed ; examined 
to find what they were doing in Swede-Turnip field just bursting into 
flower for seed, it was discovered they were feeding on the young 
unopened buds ; one bird had eaten a green caterpillar. 
“In order to find if this bird really fed its young on Aphides,” Mr. 
Lowe says, “ I had a large quantity of young examined : not one, 
from those a day old to those ready to quit the nest, had eaten any¬ 
thing but Wheat. This was on a farmstead where Wheat or Wheat- 
straw was always accessible. In towns or on grass the case might be 
different; I cannot tell.” 
Mr. Lowe also mentions that he had one or more Sparrows killed 
every week for the whole year ; for fifty weeks they ate Wheat; for 
two weeks they ate buds of fruit trees. 
The observations on this bird in Yarrell’s ‘British Birds,’ vol. i., 
state that “their young are fed for a time with soft fruits, young 
vegetables, and insects, particularly caterpillars ” ; likewise that, “ as 
summer advances, and young birds of the year are able to follow the 
old ones, they become gregarious, flying in flocks together to the 
nearest field of Wheat as soon as the Corn has sufficiently hardened 
to enable them to pick it out; and here they are for a time in good 
quarters, but when the Corn is housed and the field gleaned, their 
supply being thus cut off, they return to the vicinity of houses to 
seek again the adventitious meal which the habitations of men are 
likely to afford them.” 
In the notes of Mr. A. Hepburn, quoted as those of a practical 
naturalist, in Meyer’s ‘ British Birds and their Eggs,’ it is mentioned: 
* [They destroy some amount of caterpillars in nesting-time {vide Yarrell’s 
‘ History of British Birds,’ and Meyer’s ‘ British Birds and their Eggs,’ &c.).— Ed.] 
