September 9, 2025
I always enjoy finding house sparrows! And I love hearing their cheerful voices as they sing outside my kitchen window during the cold winter months. They are a pleasant reminder that there is joy to be found even on the dreariest of days. House sparrows, however, are not everyone’s favorite bird!
Some people dislike them because they are an invasive species—but they didn’t come here on their own! Nicholas Pike, the director of the Brooklyn Institute, imported the first eight pairs of house sparrows from Liverpool, England in 1850 to control insect pests like the linden moth caterpillars that were damaging trees on the East Coast. Pike only released 16 birds but within 30 years those sparrows, as well as others that were released across the country, turned into thousands of birds and became a serious agricultural problem and a significant threat to our native birds.
House Sparrows are known for taking over the nest boxes of native birds, evicting the birds who have already established nests in those boxes, destroying the existing eggs, killing the nestlings, and even killing the females who are incubating the eggs! They are not America’s favorite bird!
I like to keep in mind, though, that it wasn’t their idea to come here in the first place and, in spite of their ‘shortcomings’, house sparrows play a very beneficial role in our environment by controlling a wide variety of pests including caterpillars, aphids, moths, and ants. They also eat mollusks, crustaceans, earthworms, lizards, frogs, berries, fruits, nuts, and our discarded scraps of food! Let’s hear it for the house sparrows!!
House sparrows are also an excellent model organism for many avian biological studies. They are abundant, easy to raise, and generally don’t fear humans. Because these little birds are so adaptable and easy to study, there have been at least 5,000 scientific papers published over the years using them as the study species!
I love the house sparrows for their chattiness and their social skills! They often gather in big groups and fill the trees with their cheerful song, a series of ‘cheeps,’ made mostly by the males, and repeated incessantly during much of the year to announce that they possess a nest and they want to attract a female. When dozens of these little birds are singing happily together, it’s music to my ears.
When I hear house sparrows singing, I stop to listen and, if they’re not preening and fussing too much, take a few pictures. I don’t think many photographers have any interest in these birds, however. House sparrows lack the ‘pizazz’ of their more colorful cousins, like the bright red Northern cardinals, the stunningly blue indigo buntings, or the very, very orange Baltimore orioles! I love a colorful bird as much as the next person, but sometimes a sparrow is all I need!
There have been so many times when I’ve stopped to take pictures of sparrows and ended up with so much more than I expected! The sparrows draw me in with all their chattiness, but the other birds, the more solitary ones, are often hiding nearby. Some birds, like the kingfishers, just stop by for a quick hello and disappear!
It happened again the other day! I was waiting to photograph a sparrow, in a tree full of sparrows, when an elusive belted kingfisher landed on a limb right above me! I only got one shot and he was gone! In the nearby trees, I saw the leaves rustling. There were three small warblers flitting about quietly; a Nashville, a Cape May, and a Yellow warbler. Warblers rarely sit still like the sparrows, but I still managed get a few pictures.
If it hadn’t been for the chatty little sparrows, I never would have stopped for a picture. I never would have seen the warblers, or the kingfisher, or the beautiful wood duck that silently emerged from reeds in a nearby pond while I was still watching the sparrows!
Sometimes a sparrow is all I need get the ball rolling!
