Eastenders go west: English sparrows, immigrants, and the nature of fear

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 431-462

  Coates, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 30544454967     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875805000605     Document Type: Review

References (190)

1. This is a reference to the New York City pharmaceuticals magnate Eugene Schieffelin, whose two greatest passions - Shakespeare and the acclimatization of foreign species - apparently blended happily in this particular enterprise. Henry IV Part One includes the following line: "Nay, I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but 'Mortimer'." Playing on the bird's reputation for mimickry, an indignant Hotspur says this to his uncle, King Henry, who has instructed him never to mention the name of his brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer, an alleged traitor. The popular literature on non-native species is riddled with unsubstantiated references to Schieffelin's impulse. But I have been unable to establish this charming anecdote's accuracy. George Laycock - like many others - suggests that if Shakespeare had not penned that line (and if Schieffelin had not been such a crackpot), then "we might not be plagued with huge flocks of starlings from Florida to Alaska" Laycock, "Aliens," Wildlife Conservation, 95 (March/April 1992), 62. Yet there had been earlier attempts to introduce starlings that had nothing to do with Shakespeare and there would undoubtedly have been further efforts independent of Schieffelin's whims had his releases in 1890 also failed.
2. T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tortilla Curtain (London: Penguin, 1995), 41, 242, 392.
3. Ibid., 108-10, 332.
4. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 267, 207-8, 238.
5. Ibid., 206. Davis seems unaware, though, that starlings were originally imported from Britain, specifying the east coast as their source. The sparrow to which he refers is the European (house) sparrow (Passer domesticus). But he errs in attributing its arrival to Spanish colonists. Like the starling, it spread across the continent from the east, having been transplanted - as we shall see - from northwest Europe. This sparrow is not related to the many varieties of American sparrow. Most ornithologists classify it as a finch and it is most closely related to Africa's weaver finch. The European sparrow is endemic to most of Eurasia. Though Britons call it the house sparrow, nineteenth-century Americans generally referred to it as the English sparrow - not least because most of the first generation were English imports. In this essay, I defer to this contemporary (and continuing) practice. Unless otherwise specified, references simply to sparrows are to this imported variety.
6. Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 1-55.
7. See, however, Robin Doughty, The English Sparrow in the American Landscape: A Paradox in Nineteenth-Century Wildlife Conservation (Oxford: School of Geography, University of Oxford, 1978).
8. Price, 35-41, xxi.
9. In her chapter on the meaningfulness of the plastic pink flamingo - the ultimate American lawn ornament - she explains that the real flamingo "no longer even inhabits the United States" and notes, elsewhere in the chapter, that it is non-native (Price, 113, 162). This information is rather confusing. Southern Florida's flamingos are visitors from other parts of the Caribbean who appear on occasion in search of food. Since they do not maintain a permanent presence, ornithologists do not classify them as native birds.
10. Ibid., 7-58, 61, 63, 66, 81, 82, 87, 90, 94, 98, 99, 101, 62, 67, 69, 85, 94, 95, 101.
11. Frank M. Chapman, Bird-Life: A Guide to the Study of our Common Birds (1898), 142
12. Olive Thorne Miller, "A Ruffian in Feathers," Atlantic Monthly, 55 (April 1885), 490, 492, 493-94.
13. "Knowing nature through nationality" follows in the footsteps of the phrases "knowing nature through labor" and "knowing nature through leisure," chapter titles in, respectively, Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995)
14. and Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). I have chosen to write about the sparrow because its expansion and impact provoked substantially more discussion among contemporaries than the starling's exploits (perhaps because they occurred first).
15. William Leon Dawson, The Birds of Ohio (Columbus: Wheaton Publishing, 1903), 40.
16. Theodore S. Palmer, "The Danger of Introducing Noxious Animals and Birds," Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1898 (Washington, DC: US Govt. Printing Office, 1899), 98-99.
17. Leonard Wing, "Spread of the Starling and English Sparrow," Auk, 60 (Jan. 1943), 80-81.
18. William Brewster, The Birds of the Cambridge Region of Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Nuttall Ornithological Club, 1906), 66.
19. See, for example, Editorial, "The Sparrows Again," Forest and Stream, 8 (12 July 1877), 379.
20. New, York World, 48 (2 May 1883), clipping (no page number), Scrapbook 56, Charles Valentine Riley Papers, Record Unit 7076, Archives, Smithsonian Arts and Industry, Washington, DC (hereafter Riley Papers).
21. "Culture of fear" is a phrase popularized by the sociologist Barry Glassner in The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Glassner's best-seller examines a range of media-stoked scaremongering "fear alerts." Richard Hofstadter anticipated this theme in 1963 in a lecture at the University of Oxford that identified a "paranoid style" of thought and expression among arch-conservatives that saw conspiratorial threats to nation, culture and way of life wherever it looked. He singled out "frustrated nationalisms" as the "common ingredient" linking all manifestations of the paranoid style.
22. See Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), 3, 7, 59.
23. John Higham, Preface to the second edition, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of Nativism in American History, 1860s to 1920s (1955; rept. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963). The term nativism was coined around 1840 in the context of Protestant "Know-Nothing" opposition to Irish Catholic immigrants. Yet it is more commonly associated with the anti-immigrant sentiments of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans between the 1880s and 1920s, when it had acquired connotations of Anglo-Saxon (or Nordic) racial superiority.
24. For historically situated definitions see Brian Nelson Fry, "Alien Notions: Varieties of Nativism and Perceptions of Threat," Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, 1998, 20-56.
25. John A. Thompson, "The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition," Diplomatic History, 16 (1992), 25.
26. "Beware these Invaders," Arizona Daily Star, 7 May 1998.
27. See also Alien Plant Working Group, "Weeds Gone Wild: Alien Plant Invaders of Natural Areas," at http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien.html;
28. Joseph B. Verrengia, "Exotic species Turning Ecologists into Killers," Associated Press, 28 September 1999.
29. James H. Brown, "Patterns, Modes and Extents of Invasions by Invertebrates," in Biological Invasions: A Global Perspective, ed. J. A. Drake et al. (Chichester: Wiley, 1989), 105-6.
30. See also Banu Subramaniam, "The Aliens Have Landed!: Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions," Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 2 (2001), 26-40
31. Jonah H. Peretti, "Nativism and Nature: Rethinking Biological Invasion," Environmental Values, 7 (1998), 183-92.
32. Mark Sagoff, "Native to a Place, or What's Wrong with Exotic Species?," in Values at Sea: Ethics for the Marine Environment, ed. Dorinda G. Dallmeyer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 93-110.
33. I have borrowed this phrase from an article about a controversy over anti-immigration sentiment and the desire for population control within the Sierra Club. See Ron Russell, "The Greening of Hate," Los Angeles Times, 12 March 1998. Anxiety over immigration is virtually absent from Glassner's Culture of Fear, overshadowed by paranoia about aeroplane accidents, single mothers, road rage, child abduction, teenage crime, breast implants, rap lyrics, and child pornography on the Internet. And the reader will search the index in vain for entries to non-human aliens (even conventionally defined extraterrestrial ones, despite the conclusion's title "The Martians Aren't Coming").
34. Michael J. Brodhead, "Elliott Coues and the Sparrow War," New England Quarterly, 44 (September 1971), 432.
35. Ralph Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1990), 147.
36. Robert Henry Welker, Birds and Men: American Birds in Science, Art, Literature, and Conservation, 1800-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), 127-28. The job of the analogy, the simile and the metaphor is to suggest parallels between otherwise unrelated things and to encourage comparison (Paul Ricoeur calls this a "picturing function"). The effectiveness of metaphors both naturalizing and humanizing relies on the existence of common assumptions about the object of comparison. Citing the (naturalizing) example of "man is a wolf," Max Black points out that the "current platitudes" that are tied to particular animals highlight certain traits that can be readily evoked through the connection while de-emphasizing others. "The wolf-metaphor ... organizes our view of man" by transferring the received qualities of the "subsidiary" subject (the wolf) to the "principal" subject (man). In the same way, the (humanizing) immigrant metaphor organizes our view of the sparrow. The anthropomorphic metaphors that flew around during the sparrow war possessed the qualities that make what Wayne Booth calls a "good weapon metaphor" (his example, tellingly, compares a group of people to catfish). "You don't have to be an expert in semantics," argues the immigration historian Roger Daniels (with specific reference to the hydraulic metaphors of floods, tides and waves, "to understand that one result of the habitual use of such language is to stigmatize immigrants as the 'other,' rather than as the ancestors of us all." This "otherizing" process also worked to the sparrow's disadvantage.
37. See Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 142
38. Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 39-41, 44
39. Wayne C. Booth, "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation," in Sacks, ed., 55, 50-51
40. Roger Daniels, "Two Cheers for Immigration," in Roger Daniels and Otis L. Graham, eds., Debating American Immigration, 1882-Present (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 7.
41. Forest and Stream, 8 (19 April 1877), 165. Rhodes was instrumental in the first introductions to Maine (1854).
42. For the phrase "national nature," see Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 97.
43. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; rept. London: Chapman and Hall, 1946), 86 (original emphasis);
44. Owen Wister, "The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher," Harper's, XCI (September 1895), 603-4.
45. S. A. Forbes, "The English Sparrow in Illinois," American Naturalist, 15 (May 1881), 392.
46. Thomas G. Gentry, The House Sparrow at Home and Abroad (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1878), 39, 102-03. Canker worms are the larvae of the snow-white linden moth.
47. "The Chattering Sparrow: Shall it be Protected or Exterminated?," New York Times (hereafter NYT) 2 September 1878, 2.
48. As quoted in "Value of Sparrows," The Times (London), 17 August 1869, 10.
49. Gentry, 35-36.
50. William Cullen Bryant, "The Old-World Sparrow," Poetical Works (1903; rept. New York: AMS, 1972), 373-74.
51. As quoted in the The Times (London), 17 August 1869, 10.
52. "Some Faithful Servants," NYT, 28 December 1872, 8.
53. Elliott Coues, Key to North American Birds, Vol. 1 (5th edn., Boston: Dana Estes, 1903), 380
54. Thomas M. Brewer, "The European House-Sparrow," Atlantic Monthly, 21, 127 (May 1868), 588.
55. "The United States," The Times (London), 21 April 1869, 4.
56. "C" (Elliott Coues), "A Nuisance in Feathers," NYT, 27 January 1886, 10.
57. Frank Bolles, "Bird Traits," New England Magazine 13 (Sept. 1892), 96. Bolles was Secretary of Harvard University and a prominent nature writer.
58. James, American Scene, 85-86.
59. Wister, "Evolution of the Cow-Puncher," 603-4.
60. David H. Bennett, The Pary of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 80.
61. Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols and David M. Reimers, Natives and Strangers: A Multicultural History of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 234.
62. "The Chattering Sparrow," NYT, Walter B. Barrows, The English Sparrow (Passer domesticus) in North America, Especially in its Relations to Agriculture (Washington, DC: US Govt. Printing Office, 1889), 34, 146-47
63. William Temple Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation (New York: New York Zoological Society, 1913), 334.
64. Barrows, 29.
65. Bolles, 96.
66. Prescott Hall, "Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics, "Journal of Heredity, 10 (March 1919), 125-26.
67. C. M. Goethe, "Immigration from Mexico," in The Alien in Our Midst, ed. Madison Grant and Charles Stewart Davison (New York: Galton Publishing, 1930), 128.
68. On links between race, racism and conservation see Gray Brechin, "Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the U.S. Conservation Movement," Antibode, 28 (1996), 229-45.
69. On the sparrow in California see Joseph Grinnell, "The English Sparrow Has Arrived in Death Valley: An Experiment in Nature," American Naturalist, 43 (1919), 468-73.
70. "The Sparrows Again," 380
71. Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues, Citizen Bird: Scenes from Bird-Life in Plain English for Beginners (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 182, 203-4.
72. As horses do not chew the cud, many seeds pass more or less intact though the digestive tract. The combined horse population of New York City and Brooklyn in 1880 was perhaps as high as 175,000 (one for every ten humans). Each horse produced between fifteen and thirty pounds of daily droppings. Joel Tarr, "The Horse - Polluter of the City," in idem, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1996), 323-24.
73. "C," "Nuisance in Feathers." A surgeon and naturalist, Coues also edited a collection of the Lewis and Clark expedition diaries.
74. Coues, Key to North American Birds (5th edn.), 379-80.
75. Coues, Key to North American Birds, Vol. 1 (2nd edn., Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1884), 344
76. Elliott Coues and D. W. Prentiss, Avifauna Columbiana: Being a List of Bird Ascertained to Inhabit the District of Columbia (1883), reprinted in John Henry Gurney, The House Sparrow (London: W. Wesley, 1885), 61. Native bird protectionists identified the "unlimited slaughter of innocent [native] birds" as one of the gamin's prime occupations.
77. See C. D. McLouth, "Protection of Birds from the Boys," Science, 22 (22 December 1893), 347.
78. Lord Lilford, "The Destruction of British Birds," as quoted in W. B. Tegetmeier and E. A. Ormerod, The House Sparrow (The Avian Rat) (London: Vinton and Co., 1899), 36
79. Henry Jackson Van Dyke, Fisherman's Luck, and Some Other Uncertain Things (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1899), 57
80. Charlotte M. Yonge, Countess Kate; and The Stokesley Secret (London: Macmillan, 1902 (1861)), 216
81. William Yarrell, A History of British Birds, Vol. 1 (London: John van Voorst, 1871), 521
82. Barrows, 16.
83. Fletcher Osgood, "The English Sparrow in New England," New England Magazine, 29 (March 1903), 317, 321.
84. Reverend John George Wood, "The Sparrow," Wood's Bible Animals (Philadelphia: Bradley, Garretson and Co., 1875), 395, as quoted in Gentry, House Sparrow, 17-18.
85. Gentry, 100-01, 34.
86. Gentry, 27
87. Elliott Coues, "The Sparrows Again," Forest and Stream, 380.
88. Osgood, 323.
89. Gentry, 36, 59, 58, 39.
90. As quoted in Arthur Cleveland Bent, Life Histories of North American Blackbirds, Orioles, Tanagers, and Allies (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1958), 7.
91. Gentry, 58, 39, 107, 59
92. Coues, "The English Sparrow," Letters on Ornithology, No. 16, The Chicago Field, 7 (21 July 1877), 373.
93. Coues, "English Sparrow," 373.
94. Forest and Stream, 28 (7 July 1887), 513.
95. Osgood, 320
96. Gentry, 38; letter to the editor [anon], "A Good Word for the Sparrow," NYT, 16 November 1889, 2
97. "The Chattering Sparrow," ibid.; 433
98. Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, "Winter on Boston Common," New England Magazine, 17 (December 1894), 433
99. Henry W. Elliott, "The Sparrow War," Harper's, 59 (November 1879), 850
100. John Burroughs, "Birds and Birds," Scribner's Monthly, 15 (January 1878), 356.
101. Asa Gray, Letters of Asa Gray, Vol. 2, ed. Jane Gray (London: Macmillan, 1893), 476, 490, 496, 536.
102. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 173.
103. David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart. The Relationship between Britain and America in The Twentieth Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), 27.
104. John Watson, "The English Sparrow: 1. A Sketch," in Watson et al., "The English Sparrow" (from The Gentleman's Magazine), Littel's Living Age 77, 2481 (January 16, 1892), 158.
105. Thompson, "Exaggeration of American Vulnerability," 24-25.
106. Higham, Strangers in the Land, 25
107. John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (1975; rept. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001), 36-37, 46, 48, 110, 50
108. Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 11-12.
109. Letter dated 9 July in "Further Evidence on the Sparrow Question," Forest and Stream, 8 (26 July 1877), 420.
110. "N.D.," letter to the editor, NYT, 8 September 1878, 9.
111. Speech reprinted in full in Prairie Farmer, 13 September 1884, n.p., Scrapbook 59, Riley Papers. Jack was a generic name for a male commoner and also the standard appellation for a stranger.
112. Prairie Farmer, 13 September 1884. Robson was completely mistaken about Coues's family background. Both his parents were American; his great-grandfather had immigrated in the 1740s and his mother was also of colonial stock.
113. See Paul Russell Cutright and Michael J. Brodhead, Elliott Coues: Naturalist and Frontier Historian (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 15, 18.
114. Coues was born in New Hampshire in 1842. The Know-Nothing Party, founded in 1849, was renamed the American Party in 1854 and effectively expired in 1856.
115. Bennett, Party of Fear, 56-57, 59.
116. Coues, "The ineligibility of the European House Sparrow in America, "American Naturalist, 12 (August 1878), 503
117. Coues, "The Sparrow Nuisance," NYT, 18 July 1883, 3
118. Coues, "English Sparrow," 373
119. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The English sparrow made a very late cameo appearance in Ecological Imperialism as a leitmotif of North America's "Europeanized" natural world (292-93), also in his earlier book, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 210-11.
120. W. F. Segrave to the Marquis of Salisbury, 23 August 1889, Reports, Consuls General at New York, Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Diplomatic, Consular, Commercial and Treaty, 1889, FO 5/2060, National Archives (Public Record Office), Richmond, UK.
121. As reported in "The Sparrow in the United States," The Times (London), 29 October 1889, 13. This piece was reprinted as "As to the English Sparrow," NYT, 11 November 1889, 5.
122. "Argyll," "First Impressions of the New World," Fraser's Magazine, 21 (January 1881), 48, 56.
123. Ernest Seton Thompson, Lives of the Hunted (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914), 113, 109, 124-25.
124. Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972), 64-73.
125. Neltje Blanchan, How to Attract the Birds; and Other Talks about Bird Neighbors (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1902), 208-9.
126. Palmer, "Danger of Introducing Noxious Animals and Birds," 110, 107-8.
127. T. Gilbert Pearson, "Fifty Years of Bird Protection in the United States," in Fifty Years' Progress of American Ornithology, 1883-1933, ed. American Ornithologists' Union (Lancaster, PA: American Ornithologists' Union, 1933), 208.
128. I have borrowed the term "eco-jingoism" from David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 225.
129. Alexander Wilson, Wilson's American Ornithology, ed. T. M. Brewer (1808-14; rept. Boston: Otis, Broaders and Company, 1840), 39.
130. Benjamin T. Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1957), 86.
131. Ibid., 51, 86.
132. Burroughs, "With the Birds," Atlantic Monthly, 15, XCI (May 1865), 516
133. Neltje Blanchan, Bird Neighbors (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1898), 159.
134. Osgood, "English Sparrow," 324, 319.
135. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wildlife, 334.
136. Osgood, 323. For the phrase "Christian ornithology" see Schmitt, Back to Nature, 36.
137. Thomas G. Gentry, "English Sparrows," Natural History, 8 (Nov. 1874), 669
138. "Ramon," Forest and Stream, 8 (14 June 1877), 307
139. Gentry, "English Sparrows," 670.
140. Olive Thorne Miller, "A Ruffian in Feathers," Atlantic Monthly, 55 (April 1885), 494.
141. Gentry, House Sparrow, 86
142. Dawson, Birds of Ohio, 42.
143. "Tanager," "Further Evidence on the Sparrow Question," Forest and Stream, 8 (26 July 1877) 420.
144. Elliott Coues and D. Webster Prentiss, "Remarks on the Birds of the District of Columbia," Field and Forest, 11 (May 1877), 192-93
145. Gentry, House Sparrow, 39-40, 47.
146. Osgood, 317, 321.
147. Brewster, Birds of the Cambridge Region of Massachusetts, 66.
148. Hall, "Immigration Restriction," 125-26.
149. An American anthropologist coined the term "revitalization movement" in the 1950s to describe efforts to restore stability to the national body politic during times of severe sociocultural stress and dislocation. He identified nativistic manifestations that sought to eradicate disruptive alien elements as a major sub-class of revitalization movements. See Anthony F. C. Wallace, "Revitalization Movements," American Anthropologist, 58, 2 (1956), 267, 278.
150. For the comparable concept of "revivalistic nativism" see Ralph Linton, "Nativistic Movements," ibid., 45 (1943), 231. Both authors, it should be noted, confined their discussions to non-European peoples.
151. Mabel Osgood Wright, Birdcraft (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 31
152. William Walsh, 'The Starlings in Central Park,' Forest and Stream, 8 (14 June 1877), 307
153. Gentry, House Sparrow, 48, 108
154. Indiana Farmer, 27 December 1884, Riley, Box 14, Scrapbook 58. On the delights of sparrow pie,
155. see also Barrows, 166.
156. Oliver H. Orr, Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and the Founding of the Audubon Movement (1992), 208.
157. New York Times, January 27, 1886
158. "Birds or Bread?" Rural New Yorker, 44 (July 25, 1885), 502.
159. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wild Life, 213. He also singled out the transgressions of "lower class" Austrians in Minnesota and Hungarians in Pennsylvania.
160. Hubert D. Astley, "A Roccolo in Italy," Avicultural Magazine, 3, 3 (January 1912), 81, 83
161. Hornaday, foreword, 95, 98, 96.
162. Hornaday, 101 (emphasis in original).
163. Hornaday, 95-98, 100, 105, 101, 102.
164. Though Hornaday did not directly compare Italians with English sparrows, he drew a parallel with an alarming alien species that had terrorized the West Indies, but which, mercifully, was not yet resident on the American mainland: "Toward wild life, the Italian laborer is a human mongoose. Give him power to act, and he will quickly exterminate every wild thing that wears feathers or hair." English sparrow and Indian mongoose were often twinned, though, the former serving as a stark warning to those tempted to import the latter. See Edward M. Earle, "The Mungoose in Jamaica,". Forest and Stream, 3 9 (28 July 1892), 69
165. "The Biological Survey," Science, 26, 678 (27 December 1907), 914.
166. Hornaday, 103.
167. Prompted by the injuring and even killing of game wardens by subsistence-hunting Italians, Pennsylvania enacted legislation in 1906 barring gun ownership or possession by non-naturalized immigrants. See Louis S. Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 21-47.
168. Thomas M. Brewer, "The European House Sparrow," American Naturalist, 8 (September 1874), 556-57.
169. Prairie Farmer, 13 September 1884.
170. J. C. Atkinson, "A Good Word for the Sparrow," Litell's Living Age, 78 (18 June 1892), 759, 757 (reproduced from Macmillan's Magazine, 390 (April 1892), 457-64).
171. George Horton, "To an English Sparrow," The Century: A Popular Quarterly, 42 (Aug. 1891), 640.
172. "C," "Nuisance in Feathers" Dawson, Birds of Ohio, 42.
173. Henry Ward Beecher, "Star Paper," The Christian Union, 16 (8 Aug. 1877), 103.
174. As quoted in Neltje Blanchan, "Prussianizing the Campaign Against Sparrows," The New Country Life, 32 (Sept. 1917), 82.
175. Ibid., 82.
176. Wright and Coues, Citizen Bird, 182, 203-4.
177. "Plan to Wipe Out English Sparrow," NYT, 15 September 1916, 17.
178. Blanchan, "Prussianizing the Campaign," 82.
179. On this growing intimacy see Anna Maria Martellone, "In the Name of Anglo-Saxondom, for Empire and for Democracy: The Anglo-American Discourse, 1880-1920," in Reflections on American Exceptionalism, ed. David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen (Keele: Ryburn, 1994), 83-96.
180. Prairie Farmer, 13 September 1884. Pooh-poohing all the fuss over the sparrow, an Englishman living in New York City in the 1870s remarked on the relatively modest size of the American population, pointing out that numbers back in Britain were ten times larger ("N.D.," letter to the editor, NYT, 8 September 1878). This ratio has since become reversed. Though the sparrow's North American population has declined by 2.5 per cent annually since 1966, there are still over ten times as many in the United States as in Britain.
181. Besides, though the bird was naturalized across most of the continent, its onslaught was running out of steam. The switch from horse power to electric trolleys in the 1890s, and eventually to motorized vehicles, dramatically affected sparrow numbers; far fewer piles of manure and pools of spilled grain littered city streets meant far fewer sparrows.
182. Eugene Strong Rolfe, "The Passing of the Birds," New England Magazine, 22 (June 1900), 416, 419.
183. W. H. Hudson, Birds. in London (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), 7, 106, 15.
184. For references to the onset of Britain's "sparrow war" see letters to the editor, The Times (London), 21 and 2 5 December 1855, 10 and 4; 2 January 1856, 9.
185. Theodore Wood presented the British cases for and against the sparrow in Our Bird Allies (London: E. and J. B. Young, 1887), 149-82.
186. W. B. Tegetmeier and E. A. Ormerod, The House Sparrow (The Avian Rat) (London: Vinton, 1899), Preface, 48, 3-5, 40, iv, 90, 46, 43, 21, 9.
187. The Times (London), 20 December 1855; 12 and 13 December 1862; 14 March 1863; 11 April 1865.
188. See also John F. M. Clark, "The Irishmen of Birds," History Today, 50, 10 (October 2000), 17-18.
189. The most notorious victim of negative humanization in Europe and North America has probably been the indigenous wolf. See Peter Coates, "'Unusually Cunning, Vicious and Treacherous': The Extermination of the Wolf in United States History," in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 167-70, 173.
190. Until a few years ago, few Britons gave the sparrow much thought either. Then the press was suddenly awash with stories about the dramatic sudden decline in sparrow numbers, from traditional urban haunts to suburbia and the countryside. Responding to a feeling that an essential part of the nation's natural (and urban) heritage was under threat, the Independent newspaper (15 May 2000) offered £5,000 to the person who could explain the mysterious demise of this "cultural emblem." The story was even picked up in the United States. See, for example, Robyn Dixon, "Silent Warning? Sparrows are Vanishing Throughout Great Britain," Los Angeles Times, 12 July 2002, at: http://www.ecology.com/eco...02/articles. As for current American attitudes to the sparrow, it is worth noting that the New York Public Library's recent (11 October 2000 to 1 February 2003) exhibition Urban Neighbors: Images of New York City Wildlife, featured the house (as distinct from English) sparrow in the section entitled "Street and Backyard Neighbors" rather than in "Unwelcome Neighbors" ("animals for whom almost no one has a good word").