CHAPTER XXIVSPARROWS AND SWALLOWS
Poor little brown immigrants, how many enemies and how few friends they have, and yet what have they done to deserve so hard a fate? Merely following out the biblical instruction to multiply and increase—they always remind me of true Anglo-Saxon stock. They protect the family, they fight all strangers and, “Colonize, colonize,” is their motto.
I have had quite an extensive acquaintance with the English sparrow, both in town and in the country, and I think that this bad boy of the air has a worse name than he deserves. Undoubtedly he is bad; so are all boys, and all birds, and all men andwomen. We want supervision, correction, restriction—but the sparrow has good points.
Sparrow mothers lead all birds in mothering, as far as my observation goes. Again and again I have put a baby sparrow on the roof. He is a stranger picked up in the street. I do not know what nest he comes from, he does not know, no one knows. He is like the poor dog in the express car on a certain railway that ate up his tag. No one knew what place he was bound for.
Well, the instant the lost sparrow opens his little beak and gives a cry of distress, three or four mother sparrows come flying toward him with their beaks full of food. They don’t wait to see whose baby he is, as some human mothers would wait. He is a baby, and he is hungry, and they are going to feed him, and they do it until he flutters from the roof, and I have to pick him up and take care of him myself. If I put him in a cage and set him back on the roof, the street sparrows will try all day long to feed him through the bars. Yes, indeed, a mother sparrow is the best mother bird I know.
I have never tried them with the young of other birds, but I have tried their young with canaries. My canaries are the dearest and best of parents to their own nestlings, but none of them will feed the babies of other canaries. As for young robins, yellow warblers, finches, and sparrows, they utterly ignore them, unless they have particularly piercing voices. In these cases the canaries grow nervous and stufftheir own young ones as if they thought the cries of distress issued from their throats.
Once I saw a canary hitch up to a young sparrow and look down its throat. He then shook his crest and hopped away, as if to say, “I could never fill that cavity.” Two summers ago I put a demure, well-behaved young sparrow baby into a cage of German canaries. She hopped into the nest, settled her little gray body down among the four yellow birds, and unheeding the mother’s impatient pushes and shrugs, sat there till she grew old enough to take to a perch. After a time I took her out of the cage and put her on the veranda. She played there all day, but every night she came in to sleep near the canaries.
I knew she was in the room, for she flew out every morning when I opened the screen-door, but where was her sleeping-place? I looked high and low, but could not find her for a long time, until late one night, when I was saying, “I wonder where that bird is?” I saw something move slightly on the top of the canaries’ cage. A sheet was thrown over it, and under the sheet was the smallest and flattest projection. I laughed as I looked at it, and said, “I have found it at last.”
Every night this quaint little sparrow, Judy by name, had crawled up under the sheet and had slept on the wires of the cage, over her foster-mother and the young canaries. It was a very uncomfortable sleeping-place, and after I found her out she neverused it again, but took to a box on the wall near a mirror. There she sat calmly gazing at me night after night as I held up the light to look at her.
She was so interesting that I could not let her go. She seems to recognize a certain kinship with the street sparrows, for she chirps excitedly to them, but she does not care to go out with them, and has chosen for a mate a widowed Java sparrow, who is not so devoted to her as she is to him. He is good to her, however, and flies about with her, but she does all the nest-making. This summer she had a curious structure of straw among some fir branches that she kept adding to, until it was over a foot long. For some months she laid eggs in the middle of this nest. Occasionally I took out a few and gave them to the other birds to eat, but when I lifted the nest down this autumn there were still a dozen in it.
I was sorry she had been too flighty to rear some Java and English sparrow-hybrids. They would have been most interesting. Perhaps she will have more steadiness next summer. I used to be amused with her at breakfast-time. She would lean far out of her nest to see what I was giving to the other birds, then with a joyful sound to her mate that sounded like, “O Java,” she would fly down to investigate.
One sparrow I had, learned to sing some of the notes of the Brazil cardinal. The cardinal hated him and beat him frequently, but the sparrow followed him from place to place, and practised hislittle tune till it was becoming quite perfect. A sparrow is said to have a good vocal apparatus, and I suppose there is no reason why he should not sing if he wants to. Unfortunately, I put this bird out of the aviary, and I have never heard him sing again. Perhaps the birds in the street shamed him out of it.
My sparrows have mostly been good sparrows, and as a class have not been greater fighters than other birds. I have observed them in the aviary and out of it, and have rarely seen them chase or annoy smaller birds. In the city, goldfinches, robins, some warblers, purple finches, and song-sparrows came about the roof-veranda, and talked to the birds inside the netting, and sometimes my canaries go out and fly about, but the sparrows never interfere with them.
On my farm the sparrows were equally good. They never injured the tiny wild birds that came for food, but fed peaceably with them. On neighboring farms sparrows were known to tear swallows’ nests to pieces, but they never molested my swallows, though they built close to our house doors. I think possibly the reason lay in the abundance of food scattered about. The little rogues knew that there was enough for them summer and winter. They understood that I liked them, and they did not harm my other pets.
They are most intelligent birds. Living by their wits has developed them amazingly. In Paris Iused to be interested with their discrimination in the matter of making friends. An elderly man who fed a flock in the Tuileries Gardens had gained the confidence of every member of it. They would not come to strangers, but when he called “Jeanne! Pierre!” and the rest of their names, each bird would fly to him in turn.
I had a great affection for the skimming swallows about my farm, and often watched them as they caught flies or went to the low ground for mud for their interesting nests. I was very sorry to find that many of these graceful swallows suffered as much from parasites as other wild birds I had known.
One case, on a farm near me, was quite painful for the sufferers. A window in a carriage-house loft had been left open, and a pair of old swallows, finding the rafters a secluded place, built a fine mud nest against them. When the young ones were hatched they were visited every day by the farmer’s wife, who grieved to find them attacked by fat worms that mostly crawled into their ears. These worms were half an inch long, had no hair, but possessed rudimentary feet like a caterpillar’s, that were only visible under a microscope. One worm penetrated a young bird’s nostril so far that only a tiny piece of his body was visible. Enough remained in sight to seize upon, but his forced exit from the nostril was followed by a gush of blood. The sore place soon got well, and the other youngswallows also recovered after their ears were cleaned out.
The kind-hearted mistress of the farm destroyed this mud nest, made a new one of excelsior and wool, put the little swallows in it, and the parents, far from being frightened by this radical change in their environment, went on feeding their young ones, conducted them out into the world beyond the carriage house, and came back the next year to nest in the same place.
Two stories about the swallows interested me greatly. The first one was to the effect that the robin was the bird who undertook to teach the first swallow created how to build a nest. I could imagine the fussy, nervous robin entering upon the task with great haste, and it is said that she very quickly got out of patience. Every time she opened her beak to tell the swallow how to choose her mud and sticks, and how to shape the nest, the intelligent bird would say, “I know that; I know that.” At last, and unfortunately when the nest was only half finished, the robin became exasperated and flew away, and from that day to this every swallow has to be content with a partial home that often falls to pieces.
The second story was a Swedish one, and relates that when the crucified Christ hung on the cross, a swallow kept flying back and forth crying, “Svala! svala!”—comfort, comfort!
I do not believe in the increase of sparrows, andyet I bring up a certain number of them every year. How can I refuse the children who come to me with the tiny birds and say, “This is our sparrow, please feed him. We will call in a few days to see how he is.”
“Children,” I often say falteringly, “if this is a sick sparrow, you won’t blame me if I chloroform him?”
“Oh, no,” they always cheerfully reply, but unfortunately the sparrow is rarely a sick sparrow. He is usually in the best of health, and he opens his yellow-rimmed beak and stares trustingly at me, and after I give him one meal my fate is sealed. I am nurse-in-chief for many days, though a young sparrow, of all my birds, learns soonest to feed himself. Life is sacred in the eyes of children, and the way to get rid of sparrows is not by inciting boys and girls to destroy them.
The whole department of bird and animal life should be under supervision. We have too many cats and dogs, too many sparrows and pigeons in our cities. The health of the citizens is the first consideration. Each city should maintain bird-houses, and bird reservations. If I can raise shy birds on a city veranda, why could not more wild birds be raised in bird-houses in public gardens and parks?
It would not be an easy matter to thin out the sparrows, or utterly to destroy them, but it could be done, and our wild birds could be enticed back, and less money and time be spent in fighting insectpests. The birds’ little beaks will do more effective work than all our spraying and tree-climbing.
It must amuse the birds immensely to see big, clumsy mankind trying to ferret out the gipsy moth, for example. The sparrows do eat some insects’ eggs and larvæ, for I have seen them do it inside and outside my aviary—but it is a hopeless task to try to defend these poor little fellows—these “avian rats,” these “cosmopolitan pests,” as ornithologists call them. I cannot dislike them nor call them names. They are brave little birds, and when I throw open my window on a cold winter morning, and see them waiting on the opposite roofs for their breakfast, and reflect that they alone of all the summer birds are left to us in the city, I cannot deal harshly with them.
Under a certain tree, is emptied each day a certain amount of grain, no more no less, and it is put there whether I am at home or not. Birds like to know what to depend on. They don’t want to be fed spasmodically any more than we do. All day the sparrows flutter about the house. As far as I can make out we have a flock of sixty or seventy in our neighborhood. When night comes they tuck themselves away under the house-eaves, getting near the chimneys if they can. When the time comes to exterminate them I will help. In the meantime I do not see what good it would do to carry on an unsystematic and shocking killing of the helpless young ones—the pets of my children friends.