For Mulvihill, killing house sparrows is an all too typical human response. “Let’s be honest,” he said. “If bluebirds and eastern phoebes have an enemy, it’s us humans, not the house sparrows we brought here.”
First, Mulvihill noted, we wanted the sparrows to control insect pests. “They did that and made it feel like home.” he said. “Now we don’t want them because they are too good at competing with other birds we want around. This is a lesson in why you never want to introduce an adaptable species into a new environment, because it will inevitably upset the ecological balance and cause problems.”
“It rarely ends well,” added Mulvihill.
This human may be part of the problem. I could stop feeding the birds in February, which would allow year-round residents like house sparrows to disperse. I could avoid cheap bird food mixes containing broken corn, milo, wheat and rye, preferred by house sparrows, and instead use more expensive seed containing black oiled sunflower seeds, safflower seeds and white millet. And I could change from a platform feeder to a tubular one that house sparrows can’t so easily dominate.
But as the climate changes and species move, we may all have to get used to birds competing for nesting space in our own backyards. The problem, Mulvihill predicted, is “a snowball effect.”
I’ve broken down cockfights, but it seems there’s little I can do about competition between wild birds on a large scale. Even if I tried to kill all the house sparrows in my house, Mulvihill said, “you would do that year after year.”
Still, I look forward to nesting house sparrows this spring. I’ll watch every scene that plays out my own back door, witnessing the results of human interaction in the avian world: a mother bird just trying to raise her young, coping the best she can with what we humans have thrown at her .
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot’s book “A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests” has just been published by Stackpole Books.