THE FOOD OF YOUNG SPARROWS.
The sparrow lays five or six greyish-white eggs spotted with brown and ash-colour, and has frequently three broods in the year, the first being hatched towards the end of May. Young sparrows in the nest are generally fed on caterpillars and other insects,[1] particularly in August, yet a good many may be opened in June and July without finding any in them. The parent sparrows will begin to feed them on caterpillars when but a day old, but they seem to discontinue the diet a little time before they leave the nest, though, on the other hand, some young sparrows, which were quite ready to leave the nest, examined in Norfolk, did contain a few small caterpillars. But of this I am sure, that while very young their diet is quite as much unripe corn and vegetable matter as caterpillars.[2] Even at the age of one day a sparrow will feed its young one on a grain of ripe corn. Say that a young sparrow eats 14 or 15 young caterpillars a day, that is probably as good a guess as we can make. If this only went on for ten days the sum-total destroyed would be very vast, and some of the caterpillars of very injurious kinds,
- ↑ An instance of young sparrows being fed on water-beetles occurred at the beginning of August, 1884. My father ordered a pond to be cleaned out, at the bottom of which were a great many small water-beetles; these, the gardener tells me, were eagerly collected by sparrows, ten or twelve at a time carrying mouths-full of them away to feed their young with in the adjacent nests.
- ↑ Colonel Russell says he has known young sparrows to be fed with ripe wheat, which he was able to prove the old birds had to go half a mile for.—'Field,' June 22nd, 1878.
