Page:HouseSparrowGurney.djvu/58

44 Though originally a warm-country bird and sensitive to cold, the sparrow knows but too well how to take care of himself here, and, from his habits and knowledge where best to find food at bad times, is much less liable to starvation in frosty and snowy weather than other birds. In the three severe winters, 1878-81, the ranks of most common birds were so much thinned that it has taken three or four mild winters to restore them to their usual numbers, while the sparrows, so far as I saw, did not become sensibly fewer.

For my part, I believe, and, so far as fifteen years' trial goes, find it so, that we can do as well without sparrows as without rats and cockroaches. If farmers destroy all their own sparrows, they will still suffer from the swarms that come out from towns and villages.

It would be vain to expect people in general to exert themselves to abate the nuisance, especially as sparrows are at least as cunning as rats; and the usual methods of netting are not very effective. What we want is some plan which would enable one man to keep a village, a very few a town, nearly free from sparrows. I think that I have devised such a plan, on the principle of a decoy-pipe: it is not worth while to describe this, before trying it.

A few hints derived from long experience may be useful to any one who wishes to investigate the food of sparrows himself. To examine the food in an old sparrow the best plan is, if anything can be felt in it, to take out the gullet. This can be done very quickly with the fingers thus: open the feathers between the back and side of the neck, and tear open the loose thin bare skin there; this will expose the wind-pipe and gullet. Having rubbed down from outside any food near the mouth, take hold of and break off the upper end of the gullet, pull out clear of skin and feathers, and then take hold of and break off the lower end of the gullet. The food can now be pressed out from the skin-bag, or this may be kept till convenient to cut open. Sparrows killed just before they go to roost mostly have their crops full; their digestion is quick, and little or nothing is likely to be found in the crops of those caught at night at roost, or shot in the morning. The food goes a little at a time into the gizzards of old sparrows, and is there soon too much ground up to be worth