The Urban Bestiary by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Author:Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

The list of house sparrow and starling ills is much the same today as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century: they damage crops; eat flower buds and pull up seedlings; deface buildings with their droppings; stuff their bedraggled, stringy nests into every nook and cranny of our houses, shops, ledges, gutters (where they can cause water backup), vents, cinder blocks, and the visors that surround stoplights (here they seem to prefer the top light, and they have caused accidents by blocking the flash of red); and wake us early with their incessant, repetitive, unmelodious chirring that drowns out even the crows. All of these are relatively minor inconveniences for humans. But there is one more, the unforgivable thing: they compete aggressively with beloved native birds, especially cavity nesters (those that lay their eggs in hollows rather than constructed nests), for nest sites. House sparrows and starlings do not excavate their own nesting cavities but are happy to take over those excavated by others, even if the creator of the nest happens to still be inhabiting it. Eggs will be tossed out; resident nesters fought, evicted, and sometimes killed.

The Pennsylvania Messenger’s plea was one of the first eradication efforts, the “important hostility too late aroused” that Dawson spoke of. In the latter nineteenth century, many states instituted a bounty, just a couple cents each, for the birds. Children killed them with slingshots and used the money for hard candy. In just a three-month span in 1892, the county treasurers of Illinois reported paying out eight thousand dollars in house sparrow bounty on a total of four hundred and fifty thousand birds. There was no noticeable impact on the bird’s population.

All avian conservation groups recommend population-control efforts for house sparrows and starlings, but it is the bluebird societies that are the most zealous advocates of lethal measures. Some common methods of house sparrow euthanasia proposed in their literature are capturing the birds in traps, then compressing their chests or tracheae; putting them in a plastic bag and filling it with car exhaust; snapping their heads between thumb and forefinger; and holding them against a big rock and smashing their heads with a hammer. Because starlings are audacious omnivores, sometimes descending en masse to ravage agricultural crops, with subsequent heavy economic tolls, farmers and government agencies join conservation groups in working to eliminate the birds. They have deployed traps; explosives; Roman candles; plastic owls; amplified starling distress calls; chemical sprays; poisons; and a special concoction that is sprayed on the birds’ plumage and doesn’t dry until the birds freeze to death. None of these have worked in the long term.

The ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice, one of my personal heroines, asked Konrad Lorenz how he managed the house sparrows that showed up on his porch to nibble the scratch he put out for pet birds. “I never kill birds,” said the revered scientist, who confessed a respect for the ubiquitous sparrow. “To a certain extent I am a friend of successful species.

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