A male House Sparrow. (Image: Russell Sutherland via Flickr)
I was in a rush to get out of town a few weeks ago and needed a quick meal. A quick detour took me up to Broadway and there I was, waiting in line with a dozen other mostly sober people at Dick’s on a Thursday evening. When I stand in lines these days, I try really hard to not reflexively reach for my phone. Sometimes this means I have awkward conversations or eavesdrop on awkward conversations. Mostly I daydream and consider my surroundings. In this case, I looked down to see several small brown birds, one with a handsome black bib, picking at bits of food and other detritus around our cueing feet.
They were House Sparrows, Passer domesticus, birds so common that like gulls and pigeons, they often get overlooked. As a kid I’d reflexively leave them off my bird lists along with European Starlings and today still occasionally mark them with an “X” rather than counting them on eBird, which purists consider a cardinal sin. They are one of the most widespread wild birds in the world, inhabiting every continent, native or introduced.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more and more enamored with common birds, and particularly obliging species. House Sparrows are the definition of obliging, well named birds that are obligates of human built habitats. They are our bedfellows, theorized to have joined humans in the fertile crescent as we began to cultivate cereal grains (grass seeds are their primary food) and dipped our toes into building houses, (providing dwellings for the sparrows too). This apparently suited them, because House Sparrows have spread wherever there are people and are native across much of Europe, the Middle East, India, and Northern Asia. Only vast spans of water kept them from following early humans across the rest of the globe. We became domesticated together and they are so familiar that they were even carted elsewhere, either mistakenly or on purpose.
House Sparrows aren’t from around here. They didn’t reach the shores of North America until 1851 when an initial 100 birds were introduced to Brooklyn, New York to provide immigrants with a familiar bird and to help deal with insect pests (insects are second on the menu for House Sparrows). Fifty years later they hit the Rocky Mountains, jumping from city to town all the way west. A few other introductions in San Francisco and Salt Lake City in the late 1800s and there was no chance we weren’t going to have House Sparrows on the Hill today. Their range has also expanded in separate introductions to Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Africa – always cozying up alongside people.
This preference is so exacting that you can predict the human population of a place based on their House Sparrow population. The arid West is sparsely populated outside some major hubs and the sparrows follow suit. Venture away from that dusty gas station with a House Sparrow colony and as soon as the buildings are out of sight, you won’t see them. They often prefer our structures over natural cavities for nesting, which may just be because they don’t have many other options, but it’s still telling.
Despite this, House Sparrows are also amazingly flexible species. They have learned to live among people in a wild diversity of clines. From the sweltering Brazilian port cities at the equator to frigid Himalayan towns above 14,000 feet. From arid Jordan to moderately wet Capitol Hill, Seattle. Pretty impressive.
Alien, introduced, invasive – this story gets old, particularly when we talk about places like Capitol Hill. While it is true that House Sparrows often outcompete other cavity nesting birds, and have had an impact on breeding bluebirds and swallows back East, they are hardly fending off chickadees trying to nest in the vents on the apartment buildings behind Dick’s. So let’s move on and talk about the bird, because they are engaging little buggers.
House Sparrows dominating a bird feeder. (Image: John Freshney via Flickr)
Turns out that scientists agree. Because House Sparrows are so obliging, yet unabashedly wild, they have made perfect test subjects for over 5,000 scientific journal articles. They are easy to raise for controlled studies or to watch in situ. Their food preferences are undemanding. Sparrows are small and don’t need giant enclosures to live their lives. We’ve learned about evolution, urban ecology, and more from them.
Unlike many song birds in our part of the world, House Sparrows are home bodies. A House Sparrow doesn’t go off to breed on their own, they move in next door to their parents, aunts, siblings, and cousins. There’s quite the contradiction between what the research demonstrates – that House Sparrows don’t travel far from their natal grounds – and what evidence from the past 175 years in North America suggests about their ability to spread forth. But either way, home is a year-round affair – (our) House Sparrows do not migrate and rarely go farther than a mile away. (Interestingly, a gene that allows House Sparrows to digest starchy grains is lacking in the only migratory population, which also happens to be the only sub-population disinterested in close association with people!)
If you pay attention you can get to know your local House Sparrows on a individual basis. Inherent in their sociality is a pecking order, which is regularly on display as they feed, breed, and take dust baths, (individuals defend their personal dust pits). Dominant males are easy to pick out because they have larger, more obvious black throat patches. And birds higher on the pecking order aren’t afraid to show it. I witnessed this in line as one female sparrow nabbed a french fry, only to be pushed to the ground and robbed by another more aggressive female. House Sparrows are boisterously social – they posture to each other, they cheap, they squabble over food, they chase other birds away from bird feeders, they generally make trouble and don’t care. I have heard countless stories both written and from friends of House Sparrows stealing food from their plates while dining curbside or copulating within arms reach on some improbable perch.
They have no shame. We are simply existing in their homes. (Image: hedera.baltica via Flickr)
Despite being songbirds, I wouldn’t call any of the vocalizations House Sparrows make melodic. Mostly they cheep and burble, more chit chatty individual notes instead of strung together verses. Male House Sparrows are particularly vocal from late winter through mid-summer, the time of nest making. Once they’ve claimed a cavity, these talkative boys like to sit half out of the entrance and cheep incessantly for ladies to check out their digs. It’s cute if you chance upon it, but it can be grinding if said cavity entrance is a soffit vent that the screen broke on, which happens to be in the eaves over your bedroom window. Or so I’ve heard.
Although I recently heard it said that taxonomy is the death of curiosity, I can’t help but note that House Sparrows aren’t very closely related to the other birds we call sparrows on the Hill and the rest of North America. But I can’t blame early ornithologists for sharing the name. Aside from being social homebodies, the visual similarities are close enough to call our native little brown birds sparrows as well. The genus Passer is made up of 28 species that live all across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and are more closely related to obscure high altitude asian birds called Snowfinches.
Strangely enough, House Sparrows are actually in decline across some of their native range, particularly in Europe. This is largely attributed to the transition from horse to car and the advent of industrial farming – both of which deprived House Sparrows of living off the grain meant for horses and other farm animals. House Sparrows are in no danger of disappearing, they are still one of the most abundant birds on the planet and are considered a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But, I can’t help feeling a touch melancholy thinking of birds so closely tied to people, with our ever expanding population, in decline.
Call them cheeky, annoying, or invading interlopers, I generally enjoy that House Sparrows are about on the Hill. Possibly if I had seed bird feeders or was trying to make artificial houses for Violet-green Swallows I might feel a touch differently. But overall, I resonate with Mark Cocker’s musings about House Sparrows in the book Birds and People: “we have made the whole world into their habitat, and dividing a bird’s range into places where it can be approved or condemned is arbitrary and possibly even meaningless.” If it’s a choice between having them dodge between my feet for french fries or not being there at all, I’ll take the little devils any day.
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