appreciable good by eating them. If I am right in the similar conclusion I have come to with regard to insects, any good the sparrow may do is a question for the gardener.
In gardens sparrows do much mischief, as by feeding off young peas, eating green peas from the pods, stripping gooseberry bushes of their fruit-buds, destroying flowers, etc. The question remains whether they do good enough in gardens to make up for such misdeeds. Now, to prove that sparrows are really useful, it is not enough to show that they destroy some injurious insects; it must also be proved that, in their absence, other birds would not destroy them, at least as effectually. This can be found out only in one way—by banishing the sparrows from a place for some years. My object in letting no sparrows live about my house, buildings, and garden has been not only to protect the martins (perhaps it would be enough for this to kill those sparrows only which go near their nests), but also to get a better test of the utility of sparrows than could otherwise be got by any amount of examination of the food in them. My place is a fair specimen of the country, having flower and kitchen gardens, shrubberies, and small orchard, surrounded by meadows, with cornfields within easy reach all round. All birds except sparrows have been let alone there.
Sparrows having been almost entirely absent for many years, if they took insects which other birds do not, such insects would have become very numerous, and the food in sparrows killed there would show this. Now it has been quite as unusual to find an insect in an old sparrow there as elsewhere. Fifty old sparrows, and young ones which could feed themselves, were killed one summer about my buildings and garden, with food in their crops.
