THE HOUSE SPARROW.
By a Friend of the Farmers,
COLONEL C. RUSSELL.
The sparrow question has interested me from childhood; the first definite observation I can remember was that of opening half-grown nestling sparrows some fifty years back, and finding in their gizzards ripe wheat about June 20, when none could be got in the fields; the nearest place where it was likely to be found being a farmyard about half a mile distant. It struck me at once; so much for calculations of the numbers of insects destroyed by sparrows, based on counting the visits of sparrows to their nest, and assuming that they carried in nothing but insects. From that time or earlier I have observed the habits of sparrows; up to 1870 only loosely, and my impression then was that they lived mainly on corn, and though they took a few insects sometimes, that they no more lived on them than boys live on nuts and blackberries.
One most objectionable habit I have noticed from the first—that of turning the house-martins out of their nests as fast as they build them. A decrease in the numbers of the martins by this persecution has been going on steadily for the last fifty years, till they are, according to
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