To give a summary of this Table in a few words, it may be said that about 75% of an adult sparrow's food during its life is corn of some kind. The remaining 25% may be roughly divided as follows:
| Seeds of weeds | 10 | % |
| Green Peas | 4 | |
| Beetles | 3 | |
| Caterpillars | 2 | |
| Insects which fly | 1 | |
| Other things | 5 |
In young sparrows not more than 40% is corn, while about 40% consists of caterpillars, and 10% of small beetles. This is up to the age of sixteen days. Where green peas abound, as in market gardens, they form a much larger proportion of the sparrows' food than the 4% here stated.
Sparrows generally contain in their gizzards a considerable quantity of small stones, gravel, sand, brick, coal, etc., but these are only intended to grind the real food. In default of these substances they will swallow small mollusks, fragments of egg-shell, fragments of snail-shells, etc.
Sparrows should be killed for dissection in the afternoon. In adult sparrows the crop will generally give a far better idea of their day's meal than the gizzard, in which the food is so comminuted as to be with difficulty identified. If the sparrows are caught at night, they have digested their food in a great measure, and yield much less satisfactory results: the crops at that time are always empty.
