ring
down their prey. I think the superiority of the sparrow over most of
our common birds, when considered as a city dweller, is scarcely
understood. Because he had won in the race with other birds is no
necessary indication that he warred directly against them. Bird-men
often attribute to him a quarrelsome disposition, as if he actually
drove other birds away. It almost seems like animosity against the
sparrow to speak of him as attacking blackbirds and crows. It is a
cowardly crow who can be driven away by a sparrow, and if the two
cannot live together it seems to me certainly to the discredit of the
crow and not of the sparrow. I believe the truth to be that, while
the sparrow is undoubtedly a quarrelsome fellow, his bickerings are
his form of social converse with those of his own kind. A quarrel
among themselves seems not to indicate animosity, but would appear to
be the sparrow's idea of conviviality. It rarely leads to serious
results. I have never seen a male sparrow trounce any other bird with
half the vigor that I have occasionally seen the mother sparrow evince
when she caught her male companion by the feathers of his head, hung
him over the side of the limb, and vigorously and thoroughly shook him
until he desisted from his annoying and possibly insulting attentions.
The truth of the matter is that a colony of these little birds, with
their continual social chatter, including their quarrels, makes such a
continuous noise that the ordinary bird, which is generally of rather
quiet disposition, is too much annoyed by the unending nuisance to
find the neighborhood at all to his taste. Where a large number of
sparrows have gathered together the conditions are such as would give
a robin or a bluebird nervous prostration, and his only recourse is to
depart to a neighborhood where there is more peace and quiet. But our
English sparrow is not only better fitted for the struggle than the
robins and bluebirds, the orioles and the wrens. He has one important
advantage over even his own sparrow cousins. The males are
handsome--much more so than the females or than their sparrow cousins
in general.

In the song sparrow, field sparrow, chipping sparrow, and the fox
sparrow the male and female are very nearly alike in color. It often
becomes necessary for the bird-man to examine the internal organs of
the bird he is stuffing before he can certainly decide its sex. But
there is no difficulty whatever in telling the male fro