When we arrived in Eldorado on Friday evening, there was a huge amount of activity going on around our bluebird house - apparently a bluebird flying in and out, then a whole lot of finches being busy, and then - the dreaded small brown bird - a House Sparrow, sitting on top. House sparrows, as I've had caused to remark before, are - literally - death to bluebirds: at least to bluebird eggs, and baby bluebirds, and sometimes even adults. They like nothing more than to chase them off, and inhabit their nests. So we chased this sparrow off, and hung up some shiny metallic spirals I'd brought with me for sparrow scaring purposes, and waited - there seemed to be a lot of finch activity, still (finches gang up with bluebirds against the marauders); one more sparrow sighting; bluebirds peering into the house and heading away again ...
... so this morning, I thought I'd better brace myself, and take a look. Happily, no tragedy. Nor did there seem to be the remnants of any earlier tragedy last summer - I'd meant to clean the nesting box at spring break, but it slipped past me. What there was was this horrible untidy mess of a sparrow building its own nest - or rather - and by contrast to the delicate tight weaving of bluebirds - throwing together old grass stems in a haphazard way. So I removed it. This isn't illegal - one can do what one likes to sparrows since they are Non-Native Birds - having been introduced, I believe, by Eugene Schieffelin, in order to combat an invasion of linden moths eating New York's trees in the 1850s. This is the same man who imported starlings to the US - legend has it that he wanted to import every species mentioned in Shakespeare to Central Park, but that story may be, indeed, mythical.
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