December 27, 2020

This chapter discusses how a mass of sparrows descended upon the bird feeder in the author's backyard during the cold snowy weather. The house sparrow, or as it is widely known in the US, the English sparrow, was not supposed to be there. The author then explains how breeding house sparrows became a profitable business in the nineteenth century. Making loads of money out of house sparrows was possible because of two types of delusion. The first delusion can be encapsulated by the statement of the Cincinnati Acclimatization Society in 1872 that house sparrows were, in some mysterious way, ennobling for the populace of the city. The other delusion was that the house/English sparrow would control insect pests. One method for controlling house sparrows is the sparrow pot, developed in the Netherlands in the 1500s and rapidly taken up in England. Sparrow pots were hung on the walls of farm buildings in the hope that the sparrows would nest in the pot instead of damaging the thatched roof. Then the nestlings would be harvested to make sparrow pie.