supply will allow. Now people generally do not destroy sparrows, or even take their nests to any extent, less I think than formerly, some because they do not care to take the trouble, others because they are deceived by what they read about 'sparrows and other small birds.' Many things keep increasing the food-supply of sparrows at bad times; perhaps the chief thing is the greater number of horses used and oats given them, and consequent increase of food for them on the roads at all times of the year. If all oats given to horses were crushed, the numbers of sparrows would be much reduced; removing the droppings from the streets of London has of late years greatly lessened the numbers of sparrows there. Another thing in their favour is the change from the old plan of threshing by hand in the barn, whereby the waste grain went into the farmyard, where most of it was eaten by pigs and fowls, the sparrows having to compete with them to get any. There are therefore, as a rule, fewer sparrows to be seen in farmyards in winter now than formerly, but a great many more along roads, especially near stacks. These being of late years threshed out by machine in the fields where there are no pigs or fowls, the waste feeds the sparrows for a long time. In the part where I live, after a stack has been thrashed out, the straw is taken away a little at a time, each removal exposing a lot of waste corn which, with what they pick up on the roads, supports a dense shoal of sparrows for weeks or months. In many ways, too, the increase of population and wealth in the country promotes the increase of sparrows by supplying them with food, waste or otherwise, in the worst times for them—that is, when there is least corn about—worst of all, when the ground is covered with snow.
