The Meaning of Evolution

by Samuel Christian Schmucker

Man is only slowly coming to be a city-dwelling animal. Although it is a voluntary process with him, he still usually visits the country with much enjoyment. He has not as yet learned to adapt himself thoroughly to the city, for somehow city life kills him. Families that move into the city gradually have a smaller number of children in each generation until shortly the family is wiped out. The population of the city must constantly be replenished from the country. But the English sparrow is more adaptable than are the people. He has made himself at home in the heart of the biggest city. The Wall Street canyon is not deep enough, nor contracted enough, nor free enough of food to blot out the life of the English sparrow. At the heart of the deepest gully among the skyscrapers of our biggest cities we find this little bird hopping between the horses' feet, darting out from under the wheel of the push-cart, fluttering only a few yards to a place of safety, to return at once to his scanty meal upon the pavement as soon as opportunity offers. He is a typical city dweller and has learned to thrive there. Again in this matter he has distanced other birds to whom the city is more deadly than it is to people.

Another very important element in his fitness for the struggle of life lies in the fact that he is unafraid of man. He is wary of man; by which I mean he will quickly fly up from in front of man's feet. It is exceedingly difficult to catch a sparrow in one's hand. It is far easier to lure a pigeon within reach. But the sparrow, when escaping your hands, comes to rest but a slight distance away, only to elude you quite as successfully if you try again. If the sparrow is let severely alone he becomes more and more familiar with men, flies less promptly, and goes a shorter distance, but any attempt to trap him renders him shy more quickly than almost any other bird we have. He soon learns to avoid a trap in which his companions have come to grief. Those who would poison or trap sparrows must change constantly the base of their operations. This fearlessness of man is a valuable asset to the bird, for it is an important defense against other foes.

The most serious enemy the birds at large have, after man himself, is the bird of prey. Hawks and owls capture a large quantity of our smaller birds. Now the hawks and owls are for the most part shy of man. They have gotten a bad reputation, especially if they are of any size, because of their more or less pronounced proclivities for seizing our domestic poultry, and consequently many people will fire upon a hawk or an owl who would probably fire upon no other bird. By living close to man the sparrow is largely saved from the danger of capture by these carnivorous creatures, and this is the first and a very important element of the advantage to the sparrow of living near man. But there is the additional advantage that man scatters about him, in one way or another, a very considerable amount of waste food. I have suggested that the seeds in the droppings of the horse form a large proportion of the sparrow's food, and horses are to be found only with men. In the neighborhood of man's home, unless he has become sanitary to a degree which has only been attained in recent years, there is usually more or less garbage, kitchen offal of one sort or another. To this the sparrow has easy access and from it he makes many a meal. But this fearlessness of man gives him still another advantage which his competitors fear to use, it provides him with nesting sites.

Man has the faculty of putting up ornamental trimmings on his house, and there is no spot the sparrow chooses more willingly in which to build his nest than the ornamental quirks and cornices of man's architecture. A Corinthian column with comely leaves in its capital seems especially designed for the comfort of the sparrow, and his distinctly untidy nest is the familiar disfigurement of almost every ornate public building. These are the advantages which come to the sparrow from his willingness to associate with man, and there are comparatively few birds with whom he must share them. Few birds select the immediate neighborhood of man's home for their nests. They may live in the neighboring trees, they may haunt his orchard, but his house, for the most part, they decline to frequent.

Still another quality which makes for success in this buccaneer is the willingness with which he will vary his food as occasion requires. It is a not infrequent characteristic of the bird family that each species should have its own rather restricted diet. Birds are quite particular eaters, and many of them will come well nigh to starvation before they will use unaccustomed food. The sparrow, on the contrary, like man, eats almost anything he comes across that could reasonably be considered edible. He belongs to a group of birds which are structurally adapted to cracking the hard coats of seeds. This group of birds known as the finches is provided with the sort of bill familiar in the ordinary canary bird. It is short, heavy at the base, comes quickly to a point, and is firm and strong. With it the bird readily breaks through the hard outer coat of most seeds and feeds upon the rich cotyledons that are enclosed within. Nowhere in its entire structure does the plant crowd so much nourishment in so little space as it does in the seeds. It is not by chance that the great human food is grain. The sparrow belongs to the one bird group that makes a specialty of such seeds.

Most of the English sparrow's cousins in this finch group confine themselves rather rigidly to this diet. Here the variability of the sparrow again gives him the advantage. He may have the family fondness for seeds, but in their absence he can be content with almost anything edible. In the early springtime, when the seeds of last year are gone and those of the new year have not yet been produced, the sparrow is not averse to eating young buds from the trees. At this time he is not unlikely to eat our sprouting lettuce and peas. It is easy to be severe on him in this matter; but for a creature like man, who has the same tastes, who eats the enormous buds of the cabbage, the cauliflower, and the brussels sprouts, or the more tender buds which he calls heads of lettuce, it seems particularly inappropriate that he should throw stones at this little creature whose tastes are so similar to his own.

While seeds are more suitable for an elder bird they are altogether too indigestible to be the food of nestlings. So when the sparrow finds its nest full we know he must sally forth in search of nourishment more simple of digestion. Now for a few weeks he searches assiduously, catching insects and caterpillars of various kinds, and feeds them to his young. This taste passes as his children grow older, especially as shortly the seeds begin to ripen. Now is the time for the sparrow to fatten. Now he is eating the food for which he was really built. By the time the wheat is ripe there are sparrows enough about to form quite a flock, and when these settle down in a wheat, rye, or oats field and feed upon the grain, meanwhile shaking out upon the ground perhaps as much as they eat, the farmer begins to realize that the sparrow is not his friend.

When winter comes the struggle for existence among the birds is intensified, and comparatively few of them dare face it. Most of our birds betake themselves to less rigorous quarters, leaving to the sparrow a comparatively small number of competitors for the diminished supply of food. As long as the snow is off the ground the sparrows can find sufficient sustenance. They gather themselves into groups and sally out from the city into the open country. The immediate result is that great quantities of weed seeds are seized upon by the English sparrow, as, indeed, by every other finch which is with us in winter. Perhaps we have not given the little fellow credit for the good he does at this particular time, for the rest of the account truly does not help him in our esteem.

There is a further direct advantage in the sparrow's sociability. One robin may nest in the vines about your porch. If there were room for a dozen, scarcely more than one would be likely to use it, because he would drive away any other robin who attempted to share the neighborhood with him. To the sparrow company is always in order. While he may quarrel from morning until night with his fellow, it is a sociable quarrel and neither would willingly forgo it. This union is strength among birds, as with man. Every animal is safer from his enemies when he can have the constant presence of others of his own kind. The deer that stays in the herd is safer from the wolves. It is only when the latter succeed in cutting out some weaker or less sagacious animal that these carnivorous creatures succeed in tearing 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 from the female of the English sparrow. The male is far the more ornate bird. His back is striped with a richer brown; his head has two splendid dashes of chestnut over the eyes; his throat and breast are splashed with red and lustrous black; his bill is a clear fine black. Altogether the bird is strikingly colored for a sparrow, and this characteristic is the more remarkable when we see how quiet and somber is his more modest mate. This brilliancy of male plumage in the presence of the somber color of his mate would seem to indicate that the English sparrow is eye-minded rather than ear-minded. It is true among human beings that most of them are eye-minded. That is to say, they notice things with their eyes chiefly. Memories they have are memories of things seen; recollections of their friends bring up the appearance of their friends. Their language is full of metaphors which imply form and shape. But occasionally we come across an ear-minded person. He remembers voices quite as well as he remembers faces. To him music is an unending delight, and painting and sculpture fall into a distinctly secondary place. This is ear-mindedness. Now, most of the sparrows seem to be ear-minded, at least as far as their recognition of their mates are concerned. In this group beauty of song is developed many times oftener than is especial ornateness of plumage. The bird-lover who is himself keen of ear is never tired of listening, when in the field, for the two low notes with which the vesper sparrow introduces a song, the rest of which is not at all unlike the one of his song-sparrow cousin. The field sparrow begins more like the song sparrow, but ends with an often repeated note, which not a little resembles in general character the somewhat more monotonous song of the grasshopper sparrow or of the chippy. In comparison with these melodious birds the English sparrow makes no showing whatever. His voice is harsh and querulous, although very occasionally it is possible for the bird-lover to detect a note or two which would indicate that, if he were properly educated, his voice might amount to something. He wins his wife not by his pleasant voice, but by his attractive appearance and his winning ways. We have every right to infer from the character of its fellow birds of the sparrow family that once the female and male sparrow were colored about alike. But Madam English Sparrow was apparently eye-minded rather than ear-minded. Whatever pleasant voice a suitor might have seems to have been to her without attraction, and there was nothing to encourage him in developing it, nor was she likely to mate with him for it and transmit it to her male children. On the other hand, let a suitor appear in whom a more brilliant coloring proclaimed his superior vigor, and this seems to catch her eye at once. The less accomplished rival in the tournament of love seems to have been already forgotten. To their children these successful characteristics were naturally handed on and led to equal success on their part. If any of these children possessed this badge of honor in a more than ordinary degree, he was the more likely to win a mate and thus again the opportunity of passing on to his offspring his own distinct advantage. Generation by generation the males have become more beautiful and the females more discriminating. That the bird is either instinctively or actually conscious of this advantage would appear from the constant fluffing of his feathers and spreading of his highly colored wings with which he evinces his admiration for his ladylove. Even the most hardened dweller in the city can scarcely have failed to see the sparrow spread his wings, fluff his feathers, and sink close to the ground, twirling and gyrating about the object of his affection. It must give him a shock to see how often she proves temporarily or hypocritically indifferent to the demonstrative proceedings. Indeed they may terminate in a thorough trouncing of the male on the part of the lady of his affections. Now this preference for color over song must have evidently evolved in connection with the development of social habits in the English sparrows. His cousins of the fields, our native sparrows, are much less social, much less likely to be met with in flocks. To birds who scatter more, beautiful song is a great advantage. It can be heard at a long distance. But when birds flock together a much better advantage is that of beautiful clothing, added to alluring ways.