Not many are to be seen in moorland countries where corn is not grown. I heard some years ago that at Mauritius, where they had been introduced, no corn being grown in the island, the sparrows kept to the towns and did not go into the country.
Of ripe corn, sparrows prefer wheat to oats, and oats to barley; probably because wheat wants no shelling, and oats are easily shelled. They neither like to eat barley with its husks, nor the trouble of getting these off; though in default of other corn they will eat it, sometimes unshelled, sometimes after partially or almost entirely shelling it. Sparrows like green barley, and it is often the first corn they can find in neighbouring fields forward enough to eat; they will then stick to it till it becomes too hard to shell well, when they leave it for the wheat. Some farmers in Norfolk sow a narrow strip of oats at that side of a wheat-field from which the sparrows are expected to come; the oats, being ready for them earlier than the wheat, keep them occupied and save the wheat for some time. Although sparrows feed greedily on green corn, yet while feeding on it they always like to get some ripe corn for a change, and will then go a long way to any place where old wheat can be got, as where straw with a little waste grain in it has been put down in a yard, or a haystack has been thatched with it. They will also turn over horse-droppings for unbitten oats in a road alongside a field of green corn which they are feeding on.
The destruction of corn by sparrows is very great, but varies so much in different places that I cannot pretend to guess the proportion of the whole corn crop of the country to which it amounts. The mischief is greatest near towns and villages. As an instance, a friend who, a few years back, had four acres of barley close to the
