House Sparrow

First of all, I gotta say...IT'S A GORGEOUS BLUE SKY DAY TODAY. Warm and sunny...wow, for March, this is a real treat.

The House Sparrow is a handsome bird whose origins are mostly European and I did learn today why they are here. They were brought over to help eat an insect pest, but as it turned out, the sparrows only ate those when they had nestlings and they ended up eating the grains they were meant to protect. It reminded me of the mongoose, brought to Hawaii to kill the rats.. But, the mongoose and the rat have different sleep cycles, so Hawaii then had two problems.

The House Sparrow is strongly associated with human habitations, and can live in urban or rural settings. Though found in widely varied habitats and climates, it typically avoids extensive woodlands, grasslands, and deserts away from human development. It feeds mostly on the seeds of grains and weeds, but it is an opportunistic eater and commonly eats insects and many other foods. Its predators include domestic cats, hawks, owls, and many other predatory birds and mammals.

And from another site about birds:

House Sparrows were first introduced to the United States by Nicholas Pike, Director of the Brooklyn Institute of New York, in 1850, in the hope, according to Barrows (1889: 294), that 'they would control a plague of the "hanging worm" or measuring worm' (larva of the Snow-white Linden Moth Eunomos subsignarius) that was defoliating trees. These birds, liberated in 1851, did not thrive, but a second and larger shipment imported from England in 1852 was more successful, and the birds, released in the Narrows (between Staten Island and Brooklyn) and in Greenwood cemetery, quickly became established (Palmer 1899).
Until at least well into the 1880s large numbers of House Sparrows (some 1,600 of which were imported from western Europe and were thus of the nominate subspecies) were freed in over 100 urban localities in 39 American states and four Canadian provinces. ...
According to Johnston & Selander (1964), geographic morphological variations have developed among House Sparrows in North America as a result of widely differing environmental conditions; thus northern birds tend to be larger than those in the south, and birds in the arid southwest are paler than those in the west and east.


See ya