This year we honor World Sparrow Day with a look at how they got to North America and the Sparrow War of the 1870s that followed. Matt Halley joins us to talk about the weird but true history of exotic bird introductions in the 1800s and the Sparrow War that followed the successful (or catastrophic, depending how you look at it) introduction of the house sparrow. Tony works in another sparrow war half a world away, and we conclude with a reminder not to let dead birds go to waste (and to report them in iNaturalist!).
For further reading check out the following sources we discuss:
- The Great Sparrow War of the 1870s, by Matthew Wills in JStor Daily
- The Story of the Most Common Bird in the World, by Rob Dunn, in Smithsonian Magazine
- The House Sparrow at Home and Abroad, by Thomas Gentry
- Wild Birds Introduced and Transplanted in North America, by John C. Phillips
- Fragments of the Natural History of Pennsylvania, by Benjamin Smith Barton, MD
- And, of course, listen to our original World Sparrow Day episode.
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