For Mulvihill, killing house sparrows is a perfectly normal human response. “Be honest,” he said. “If bluebirds and eastern phoebes have enemies, it’s us humans, not the house sparrows we brought here.”
First, Mulvihill points out, we want sparrows to control pests. “They did it, and it felt like home.” he say. “Now, we don’t want them because they’re too good at competing with the other birds we want around. This is a lesson in why you never want to introduce an adaptive species into a new environment because it will inevitably upset the ecological balance and create problems.”
“It rarely ends well,” Mulvihill added.
This person could be part of the problem. I may stop feeding the birds in February, which can cause year-round residents such as house sparrows to disperse. I can avoid cheap bird food mixes containing cracked corn, milo, wheat, and rye, preferred by house sparrows, and use more expensive seeds containing oil sunflower seeds instead. black, safflower and white millet. And I can change from a feeder to a tube that the house sparrow can’t easily dominate.
However, as the climate changes and species migrate, we may all have to get used to seeing birds scrambling for nesting space in our own backyards. Mulvihill predicts the problem is “about to snowball”.
I’ve broken up the cockfights, but there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about competition between wild birds. Even if I try to kill all the sparrows in the house, Mulvihill says, “you will do it year after year.”
However, I’m still on the lookout for sparrows that break their nests this spring. I would watch any scene that plays out in my own back door, witnessing the result of human interaction with the avian world: a mother bird simply trying to raise her baby, deal as best we can with what we humans have thrown at it.
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot’s book A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests has just been published by Stackpole Books.
