Abstract

This chapter details how the bird feeders in the author's backyard have become an integral part of the daily feeding routine for the house sparrows that live in the forsythia hedge at the bottom of the road. Anna Comstock's description of them as English sparrows is accurate only in a parochial sense—that they were brought across to the US from England. Really, house sparrows started out in the Middle East, where, with the advent of human agriculture about ten thousand years ago, they switched from being migratory birds that lived in natural grasslands to life with humans. Today, house sparrows live almost entirely in human-dominated places and they have the dubious distinction of being the most widely distributed of all bird species. The author then reflects on the practice of bird feeding, before describing the visit of a red-tailed hawk.

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