But “eventually” is also an important word here, as they found out in China. If you get rid of the sparrows, the populations of the insects that the sparrows eat will go up. The bluebirds and other birds that also eat those insects will start reproducing more (or coming in from elsewhere), but that won’t happen immediately. You might get a few months or years of high insect populations before that happens. That can be a problem if the insects are eating local crops. If you get rid of an invasive species, the ecosystem doesn’t immediately go back to the way it was before that species was introduced.
Even if the ecosystem did immediately revert to what it was before people started mucking with it, that wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing from a human point of view. Natural ecosystems don’t always work in favor of human goals like growing food and not having epidemic diseases. The equilibrium that is eventually reached without sparrows might well have more insect pests or insects that do more damage to people and their crops than the system had when there were sparrows around.
Ecosystems are complex things, and the law of unintended consequences does operate when it comes to trying to change them.
If I got a bb gun and started shooting sparrows and starlings all day, I doubt it would have any measurable effect on their number. In the winter flocks of starlings number in the thousands here in Utah. Weh I walk past most evergreen trees I can hear a flock of sparrows inside them.
Many of the birds at my feeder are introduced species. The House finch was introduced from southern California. California quail, chukar, gray partridge, and ring-necked pheasant are all common here in my part of Utah but none of them lived here before people brought them. If we were to eliminate them, there is no guarantee that the native bluebird, goldfinch or junco would breed enough to fill their niche before the insect population got out of control.
Looks like some areas of the country are already so overrun that there may no hope even for a small one yard refuge. Personally, I have two happy bluebird families (and some other native species and no sparrows) on my 1.5 acres … and no insect problems … I doubt my little yard is going to cause any sort of ecosystem-wide trouble … I’m not talking total elimination from the entire continent, just giving the native species a chance / place to survive.
Martins are too much work for me to want to get involved but there are some people in the area who are attracting colonies. Purple Martins are pretty much totally dependent on humans to provide nesting space for them.
But Brown-headed Cowbirds aren’t introduced - they’re natives, just doing what they’ve done in North America for likely thousands of years. The problem with cowbirds in the past century is that human disturbance has proven a boon to them, especially the clearing of woodlands and expansion of range lands. Locally they can be a problem, but on a whole it has been argued that the threat they represent to songbird populations generally has been overblown. Audobon summary of issues: http://www.audubon.org/bird/research/
That’s an amazing video – thanks!
What’s with eradication? I think a good argument could be made that the European Starling should be our national bird. Immigrant from Europe, kicks the crap out of the natives, taking their land and resources, flocking together in loud numbers…
Temporarily, yes. Starling killers, like the rat killers of Asia, would not take long to figure out that killing all the starlings would put an end to their income. They’d “overlook” some nests, and in time starling killers would start breeding their own starlings. It’s easier to be a starling farmer, at a buck a head, than to go out and hunt them.
But that is far from the reality of some places that have known the full force of the starling problem. You are thinking of one person making a huge dent in the starling population. I lived 15 miles from a small town of about 20,000 people. The problem there was so bad that the United States Army couldn’t kill half of the birds on one piece of property – even though it belonged to the Feds.
At the arsenal in Milan, Tennessee in 1975, there were eight million starlings. You would think that an afternoon of test firings would frighten them off. I could hear the tests on the other side of the county.
The starlings have an oil that covers them that helps to protect them from the cold. The army dropped turgatol – a detergent – on them to wash off the oil. I believe they sprayed them with water too. The temperature got too cold for them that night and three million of them died.
Then, of course, they had to get rid of three million dead birds.
Many people in Middle and West Tennessee and Kentucky have had histoplasmosis – a respiratory infection caused by a fungus from the birds. I do and I found a fellow Doper from this area who did when I went to a DopeFest.
At the same time, there were five million of the starlings at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky on the Tennessee border. Why the love of federal property? This couldn’t have been good for the 101st Airborne. Can you imagine what these birds could do to planes? And these folks were the Screaming Eagles!
There were more starlings than people in 1975. There were 350 million of them.
Normally, I don’t kill even ants. I do swat misquitoes. That’s where my line is. I have a somewhat basic understanding of how changing just a little part of the echo system affects the whole. But when starlings were introduced, I was part of the whole that was negatively affected. My nature bids me to react my using my intelligence to say that these nasty birds are not good for human beings and song birds to be around. Too many droppings everywhere. Too much fungus.
I don’t know what the population of starlings is now. I just know that we don’t have the great number of song birds that we had when I was a child.
He may have done the sparrows. We can thank Eugene Schieffelin for the starlings, though whether he was motivated by Shakespeare or trying to control bugs is debatable.
Ironically, here in N. Europe, both the starling and the sparrow populations have declined dramatically in recent years, to the chagrin of bird lovers.
Nope, I’m figuring dozens if not hundreds would make a concerted effort for weeks to plink off hundreds of them a day. Heck high school kids with pellet guns would make more in an afternoon than they could at a part time job. With a population density like you mentioned, sure it might take a while, but compared to the costs of flight crews, and millitary personell and or ammo, something like this might make an interesting idea, especially if it isn’t dense urban areas. In addition, with a collection point/cashin spot, the dead bodies dont need to to be policed up, the hunters need them as proof of kill.
You could probably go much lower on the bounty even and still be cost effective for airguns while making the program much cheaper and safer for the countryside.
My worry is you’d get indiscriminate hunters who would shoot anything that flies and just leave the non-qualifying birds.
You know those thought experiments where you have to say what you might change should you go back in time? If I was limited to the early 1870s or so, I might just have to take aim at the American Acclimatization Society and pick off the Shakespeare fans.
