Uncaring and ubiquitous / Esteem shovel

A house sparrow looking pensively over the edge of a worn, pebbly sidewalk curb in New York City on a sunny day
Image courtesy of the author

Today: Tom Scocca, editor of Indignity; and Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel, and Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography


Issue No. 119

A World Built for House Sparrows
Tom Scocca

No, No, I Didn't Expect You to Remember the Underminer
Laurie Woolever


A World Built for House Sparrows

by Tom Scocca

The house sparrow is not an interesting bird. That may have been what finally caught my attention: how hard it was to pay attention to them. Their little drab forms are everywhere—I started phone-typing this paragraph walking down a cross street, and a half-dozen of them immediately darted out from around a tree box to splash in a puddle in the roadway—but the eye and brain quickly edit them out. (Out on Broadway, another one picked up a hunk of bread, flew veering back and forth over the sidewalk struggling with the weight of it, and dropped it again.)

There was a time, long ago, when I thought a house sparrow might be something notable—the male, anyway. The gray cap, black mask, and chestnut temples, down by the city pavement, looked nothing like the striped heads of the countless white-throated sparrows in our backyard in the woods. But now I live in the city and a white-throated sparrow in the park is like an old friend from home. The house sparrow, Passer domesticus, registers no more than the grime on the sidewalk does, unless I glimpse one scurrying by the trash at the curb and briefly mistake it for a mouse or rat. 

“[D]o I love the house sparrow? That I find difficult to answer,” the British ornithologist and engineer J.D. Summers-Smith wrote in his 1963 monograph The House Sparrow, the first of five books he would write about the bird and its relatives. “I do know that I should find life extremely dull without them as my constant neighbours,” he added. According to his obituary in the Guardian, he had started studying the species in 1947 because, with postwar gas rationing in effect, he didn’t have to travel anywhere to see them.

And Summers-Smith was equivocating about them on their native territory. Here in the New World, the house sparrow is a vicious invader, known for stealing nest sites from the lovely native bluebird, often murdering the bluebirds in the process. And not just bluebirds, either. The sparrows (“English sparrows,” at the time) were released around the United States in the second half of the 19th century by people who thought they were charming—or, in Brooklyn, who hoped they would kill off a plague of inchworms. Edward Howe Forbush, writing in his Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States in the 1920s, described the aftermath: 

Most of the House Wrens, Purple Martins and Cliff Swallows, which had been abundant in southern New England, disappeared, the Sparrows having taken their nests. For example, Mr. B. H. Newell, of City Point, Maine, wrote to me that one female Sparrow took nearly every egg out of thirty-five Cliff Swallows’ nests at his place, by merely driving her bill into them and letting them drop from the nests. The interlopers tore down the nests of other birds to get material with which to build their own nests, and in their eager search for linings for their clumsy domiciles they have been known to snatch hair from the back of a live dog. By attacking in numbers the Sparrows were able to kill birds as large as the Robin or the Northern Flicker.

Then again, in fairness, no bluebird or cliff swallow would have been trying to eat discarded bread off the ground on Broadway, even if their populations had never been molested. The house sparrows are here because the house sparrows go where human beings go, across six continents and all four hemispheres. Summers-Smith wrote that they “spread along railway lines during their construction, by living on scraps at the railhead camps,” and that they followed troops into the previously uninhabitable Sinai desert during the First World War; when people move off of islands, the house sparrow population dies off behind them. Their most visible absences on the map are from the Arctic tundra, the jungles and rainforests of the tropics, and East Asia, where the Eurasian tree sparrow occupies their role. 

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