The Great English Sparrow War

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
A few times over the past few years, science writer
Rosemary Moscow has told me that a good topic for
this podcast might be the sparrow War, and the first
couple of times she suggested this, I was like Chairman
Mouse thing, because we talked about that on the show
in an episode on the famine that was connected to

(00:37):
Mao Zedong's four Pests campaign, which involved trying to eradicate spars.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
This is not that.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
The one that Rosemary was suggesting was a dispute over
the house sparrow, which at the time was often called
the English sparrow, and the introduction of this bird into
North America. So Rosemary is the author of a pocket
Guide to Pigeon Watching, Getting to Know the World's Most
Misunderstood Bird, along with several other books, and she wrote

(01:05):
an article about the house sparrow for Autumn Magazine in
twenty twenty three that was titled Meet the Little Brown
Bird that holds a mirror up to humanity. And this
is something that she came across while doing research for
these things that she's written, and just kept.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Sort of prodding me about it.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
She is right, I do love a ridiculous feud, and
this was ridiculous, so it took me a while to
get to it. But thank you Rosemary for the suggestion.
A lot of people had very strong opinions about how
sparrows in the late nineteenth century, which continues to be
true today, but this feud was mainly between Elliot Cows

(01:46):
and Thomas Mayo Brewer. We're not going to try to
do full biographies of these two men, but we did
want to give a glimpse into who they were and
what they did aside from fighting over sparrows. Thomas Mayo
Brewer was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on November twenty first,
eighteen fourteen. He was from a well off New England family,

(02:06):
and his grandfather, Colonel James Brewer, participated in the Boston
Tea Party. Brewer went to Harvard Medical School, and after
becoming a doctor, he spent some time with a medical
practice in Boston's North End, but eventually he left medicine
and he became an editor at the Boston Atlas, where,
in the words of an obituary. He became a quote

(02:28):
political writer of unusual ability.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
He was also interested in birds and in wology, or
the study of bird eggs. He started publishing on birds
in eighteen thirty seven, and he developed a reputation for
himself within the field. In eighteen seventy four, he published
a three volume history of North American birds, which was
co authored with Spencer F. Baird and Robert Ridgeway Brews.

(02:54):
The Waterbirds of North America was also published, but posthumously.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Brewer also became a friend and colleague of John James Audubon.
Audubon named at least two birds after Brewer, although one
was a duck that turned out to be a Mallard
Gadwell hybrid and not a newly described duck species, and
the other one was a blackbird that had already been
described by someone else.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Brewer died on January twenty third, eighteen eighty, at his
home in Boston, at the age of sixty five. In
addition to his work in journalism and ornithology, he had
also served on the Boston School Board. He was survived
by his wife, Sally R. Coffin, who he had married
in eighteen forty nine, as well as their daughter Lucy
Stone Brewer. Thomas and Sally had also had a son, Charles,

(03:40):
who had died in childhood. During his lifetime, Brewer had
built a collection of bird eggs that included almost fifteen
thousand specimens from three thousand different species, described as one
of the largest such private collections in existence. He left
this collection to the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge.

(04:00):
In the words of an obituary in the Bulletin of
the Nattal Ornithological Club, of which Brewer was a member, quote, Socially,
doctor Brewer was greatly esteemed. His warm sympathy, his loyalty
to friends, and to his convictions of truth and duty
were marked traits in his character removed suddenly, and when
there were apparently years of activity and leisure before him

(04:22):
for research. His loss to science is not easily replaced.
But also in the words the Biographical Dictionary of American
and Canadian Naturalists and Environmentalists, quote, Brewer regarded the field
of Massachusetts birds as his private domain and did not
think highly of younger generation of ornithologists. One of the

(04:43):
younger generation of ornithologists was Elliot Ladd Cow's He was
born on September ninth, eighteen forty two, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
and was also descended from early colonists. When he was
still a child, his family moved to Washington, d c.
And that's where he lived for the rest of his
life life except when he was stationed somewhere else as
an army surgeon. He studied medicine at Colombian College, which

(05:06):
is now George Washington University, earning an MD and a PhD.
Cow's work on birds and his time in the army
both started while he was still in medical school. He
published his first work on birds in eighteen sixty one
at the age of nineteen, and he enlisted in the
US Army as a medical cadet a year later. He
was recognized for his work in ornithology right away. That

(05:29):
first monograph, which was on North American shore birds, was
described as something that would have reflected well on a
scientist of much greater experience. Cows also published on mammals
and reptiles, producing at least three hundred works over the
span of about twenty years. In addition to all of that,
he worked with the US Northern Boundary Commission and the

(05:50):
US Geological and Geographical Survey of the territories in the
eighteen seventies.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Cow's major work on birds included Key to North Americans Birds,
which first came out in eighteen seventy two. His Checklist
of North American Birds was published in eighteen seventy three,
and Field Ornithology came out in eighteen seventy four. He
also edited and published the journals and other writings of
a number of explorers and travelers, including the History of

(06:18):
the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Expeditions of Zebulon
Montgomery Pike. In eighteen seventy seven, he was elected a
member of the National Academy of Science, and eventually became
a member of most of the scientific societies in the
US and Europe for a time. Cows was also deeply
interested in spiritualism and theosophy. He wrote a number of

(06:40):
works on these subjects, including, for example, two letters in
the Nation on December twenty fifth, eighteen eighty four, one
on psychic research and the other on the feasibility of
studying ghosts. The letter on ghosts discusses all the ways
that ghosts can be studied using evidence gathered through a
person's senses, including writing that ghosts quote frequently, not usually

(07:01):
emit a perceptible odor, sometimes very strong, sometimes fragrant, sometimes
the reverse, nearly always peculiar to themselves. He was a
friend of past podcast subject Madam Blovotsky, and held offices
in the Theosophical Society, including serving as president of its
American Board of Control. But in eighteen ninety The New

(07:24):
York Sun published an expose titled Blovotsky Unveiled. This took
the form of an interview with Cows. I don't know
what caused his sudden about face here, but afterward he
was expelled from the Society. Blovotsky filed suit against him
and against the Sun, but then she died in eighteen

(07:45):
ninety one. After her death, the Sun retracted the expose,
and this almost became its own episode. It could maybe
one day, but it's was eventually like you gotta go
back to the sparrows now, right. Madam Blovotsky had a
lot of ups and downs with people, so I'm not

(08:06):
entirely surprised. Elliott Cows died at the Johns Hopkins Hospital
in Baltimore, Maryland, on December twenty fifth, eighteen ninety nine,
at the age of fifty seven. I was following a
pair of surgical procedures. He had been in a coma,
but in the moments before his death he reportedly regained consciousness,
sat upright, and said, welcome, Oh, welcome, beloved death before dying.

(08:31):
Cows had been married twice, first to Jane Augusta McKinney
in eighteen sixty seven. They had five children, three of
whom survived childhood. Their marriage ended in divorce in eighteen
eighty six, and the announcement of the divorce that ran
in the Washington DC Evening Star describes Cows not as
a doctor or as a scientist, but as the noted theosophist.

(08:53):
His second wife was Mary Emily Bates, who he married
in eighteen eighty seven. In the words of a biographical
moir of Cows that was read before the National Academy
of Sciences in nineteen oh nine, quote as an antagonist,
he was sometimes bitter and unforgiving. The only mention of
Sparrows in that piece is in the footnote to that sentence,

(09:14):
which reads, quote, an unfortunate illustration is his controversy with
the late doctor T. M. Brewer, of which doctor Cows
himself said, twenty years after the death of his opponent,
the controversy had become between doctor Brewer and myself, a
personal feud with the usual accompaniments in the way of
sweetness and light. We'll get to what they were feuding

(09:35):
about after a sponsor break. In the eighteen fifties, caterpillars
were a problem in the Eastern United States. Different accounts
named different caterpillars, but most of them are moth larvae

(09:56):
that kind of dangle from their silk, and they were
colloqu called things like dropworms or canker worms. Rosemary Moscow's
article on the house sparrow cites an inch worm called
the elm span worm. Other sources cite linden moth larvae,
which are also inch worms. During an outbreak, these caterpillars

(10:19):
defoliate trees, drop onto people and surfaces, poop everywhere, and
they just generally make a big mess. Most of the time.
The damage from a caterpillar outbreak is unsightly, but healthy
trees can't typically survive a year or two of caterpillar defoliation.
Usually trees only die if there's also something else going on,

(10:39):
like a drought, or a disease, or if the caterpillars
defoliate the same tree year after year after year. Caterpillar
outbreaks are usually cyclical. Typically they eventually end on their own,
but people often want to try to do something about them,
and one proposed solution for the caterpillar problem in the

(10:59):
mid nineteenth century was to import house sparrows or passer
domesticus from Europe. These are small, stockybirds and shades of buff, brown, gray,
and black, with the males more brightly colored than the females.
They're native to a lot of Europe and Asia, as
well as northern Africa. So to today's ear, introducing a

(11:21):
non native bird species with the hope of controlling caterpillars
with them probably sounds like an obviously bad idea. This
is Homer Simpson logic. We have talked on the show
before about what happened when people tried to use kudzu,
which is native to East Asia, for erosion control in
the United States, and what happened when colonists brought rabbits
from Europe to Australia because they wanted Australia to feel

(11:44):
more like Britain. Kudzu was later nicknamed the vine that
ate the South, and we discussed those rabbits in an
episode about an attempt to fence off an entire portion
of Australia just to contain them. There are actually three
fences because the rabbits kept getting ahead of the fence bill.
But this sparrow importation idea was happening alongside the acclimatization movement,

(12:07):
which developed primarily in the UK and France in the
eighteen thirties and forties. This movement was connected to colonialism,
and it was focused on introducing non native species and
acclimatizing them to their new homes, as well as reshaping
the world through the introduction of these plants and animals.
This was more intentional and systemic than most earlier efforts

(12:31):
to try to introduce non native plants and animals to
other parts of the world, so things like the introduction
of food crops from the Americas to Europe and vice versa.
Starting in the late fifteenth century, there were more than
fifty acclimatization societies around the world by nineteen hundred, and
while the ones in the United States were established after

(12:52):
the sparrows had already been introduced, the acclimatization movement was like.
Part of the context for their introductions was all to
how people were thinking about what it was okay to
do with non native plants and animals.

Speaker 1 (13:06):
The first attempts to introduce how sparrows into North America
were not successful. One of the earliest was in eighteen
fifty when the Brooklyn Institute in New York got eight
pairs of sparrows from England and kept them in cages
over the winter. The birds did not thrive when they
were released in the spring, but the birds fared a
bit better in a second attempt two years later. The

(13:28):
first really successful effort was likely in Portland, Maine, in
eighteen fifty four.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
Soon other cities were discussing whether they should import house
sparrows as well. Cities started buying hundreds or even thousands
of sparrows, mostly from England or Germany, and then releasing
them into their parks and other green spaces. A number
of articles written more recently about the sparrow war also
described immigrants to the United States as wanting to have

(13:55):
familiar birds around. It kind of conjures up images of
like people getting onto a steamship with a pair of
birds in a cage. Really, though, the biggest releases of
sparrows in the United States seem to have been carried
out by cities or civic organizations, not people coming to
the US with a couple of familiar birds.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
And at first there was a lot of enthusiasm around
the idea that the sparrows might save everyone from all
those pesky caterpillars. For example, in eighteen fifty nine, William
Cullen Bryan wrote a poem called The Old World Sparrow,
which began, we hear the note of a stranger bird
that ne'er till now in our land was heard. A
winged settler has taken his place with tutons and men

(14:37):
of Celtic race. He has followed their paths to our hemisphere.
The Old World sparrow, at last is here the insects
legion that sting our fruit and strip the leaves from
the growing shoot, A swarming, skulking, ravenous tribe which Harris
and Flint so well describe but cannot destroy. May quail
with fear for the Old World sparrow. Their bane is here.

(15:00):
If you're thinking something about this poem feels a little
racist to me, we're gonna get to that later.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
Uh. And not everybody thought this was a great idea,
especially as the number of sparrows started to grow and
people realized that they were not only not magically ridding
North America of unwanted caterpillars, but were also eating grain
and other food crops. In April of eighteen sixty seven,
Charles Pickering spoke before the Boston Society of Natural History

(15:32):
describing the introduction of the European house sparrow as threatening
a great evil. According to the society proceedings, he cited
proofs from quote standard authors that showed that the bird
had been quote the acknowledged enemy of mankind for more
than five thousand years. In eighteen sixty eight, Thomas Mayo

(15:52):
Brewer came to the house sparrow's defense in Atlantic Monthly, writing, quote,
the sparrow is not all evil.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
That he does. A great deal of good is now
universally admitted. The good already accomplished by the few of
his race domiciled among us, is indisputable and of the
first importance. Brewer did acknowledge that there were reports of
the birds eating ripening grain, but he ended this piece
with quote, the house sparrow will erelong become one of

(16:20):
our most common and familiar favorites. By eighteen seventy two,
Elliott Cows was voicing his doubts about the sparrows. On
May twenty eighth of that year, he wrote to zoologists
an ornithologist to J. A. Allen, saying, quote, do you
share my apprehension about that wretched ornithological bouvers mont passer domesticus.

(16:40):
I despise the site of that bird in this country.
I'm not sure how Alan responded, but at this point
he might not have actually shared Cow's apprehension. Yet two
years earlier he had written a piece on the rarer
birds of Massachusetts for The American Naturalist, and he had
said of the sparrows quote two pairs turned loose in

(17:01):
the Boston Common a few years since seemed to be
slowly increasing in numbers, and bid fair to be of
great service in checking the ravages of several species of
caterpillars that now greatly injure the foliage of the shade trees.
These interesting birds are now frequently observable, both on the
common and in the public garden. Cows also voiced his

(17:21):
apprehension in his Key to North American Birds, which came
out that same year. It described the birds as already
abundant in many towns and cities of the Eastern and
Middle States, and also recently introduced into Salt Lake City. Quote,
it has proved highly beneficial by destroying cankerworms. The pest
of our shade trees, and our dusty streets are enlivened

(17:42):
with its presence. But if it continues to multiply at
the present rate, it must soon overflow municipal limits. And
then the result of the contact of this hardy foreigner
with our native birds may cause us to regret its introduction,
unless it finds natural enemies to check its increase. So
Cows and Brewer already had differing opinions on this sparrow,

(18:05):
but until this point their relationship seems to have been
pretty cordial. Cows had referred to Brewer as a friend.
But things started to become acrimonious in eighteen seventy four,
and we'll get to that after a sponsor break. By

(18:27):
the early eighteen seventies, it had become clear that how
sparrows were not going to save North America from caterpillars.
They did eat caterpillars, but in some areas that inchworm
outbreak had ended and a new caterpillar outbreak had started,
but these were fuzzy caterpillars that the sparrows apparently did
not like to eat. The sparrows also liked to eat grain,

(18:49):
that was of course a problem with crops, but they
also liked to pick partially digested grain out of horse manure,
which was all over the streets and cities and towns
and the era before or the introduction of automobiles, So
people obviously thought that was gross and that the birds
were unsanitary. House sparrows also like to nest in and

(19:10):
near buildings, and they like to congregate in the foliage
and sing together, and people found their chirping very annoying.
In July of eighteen seventy four, Elliot Cows reported a
communication from ornithologist and naturalist Thomas G. Gentry in the
Zoology section of American Naturalists, saying that European sparrows were

(19:30):
driving robins, bluebirds, and native sparrows away from Germantown, Pennsylvania,
and that their population was growing rapidly. Cows added to
this quote, I did not expect the bad news quite
so soon. Probably it will not be long before we
hear the same complaints from other places. I have always
been opposed to the introduction of the birds, mainly on

(19:51):
this score, but also for other reasons. There is no
occasion for them in this country. The good they do
in destroying certain insects has been overrated. I foresee the
time when it will be deemed advisable to take measures
to get rid of the birds, or at least to
check their increase.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
In September, American Naturalists printed a response from Thomas Brewer,
who wrote, quote, I regret very much that a naturalist,
generally so well informed as doctor Cows should aid in
giving what my own observations compel me to believe to
be an altogether wrong statement in regard to the House Sparrow.
Brewer described Cows as biased. I mean he had admitted

(20:32):
he was opposed to the bird's introduction from the beginning.
Brewer said, now Cows was condemning the birds based on
the scantiest of evidence. Brewer also rejected Gentry's report entirely,
and he refuted it point by point, but his refutation
mostly involved him saying that he did not believe what
Gentry had written, and he had not observed the birds

(20:55):
doing those things, and had in fact seen the opposite.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Brewer and Cows also had a similar back and forth
in American Sportsmen, and in eighteen seventy seven they rehashed
the entire same argument in the Washington Gazette. By this point,
most ornithologists and other scientists generally agreed with Cow's position
on the sparrows, but Brewer still had defenders from other fields.

(21:21):
Clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, condemned
cows and praised the sparrow in a piece called Sparrows
to the Rescue, which was published in the Christian Union
in eighteen seventy seven. Beecher wrote of cows, quote, his
name shall be known in the Kingdom of Birds as
a public foe. A price shall be put upon his head,

(21:41):
and on some day, unawares, he shall be surrounded by
swarms of sparrows, darkening the sun, and multitudinous as the
locusts of Minnesota. This piece then kind of becomes the
reenactment of Offered Hitchcock's The Birds, with the birds targeting cows.
Other opponents included Henry Burr, founder of the American Society

(22:03):
for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who called him a murderer.
In January of eighteen seventy eight, Brewer visited Cows at
his office in Washington, d c. Where their discussion apparently
became heated. Cow said the Nuttall Ornithological Club, of which
Brewer was a member, should investigate the impact of the
house sparrow, and the club did, but Brewer did not

(22:26):
attend the open meeting where the birds were discussed, and
the club's other members were critical of the sparrows. A
couple of incredibly insulting articles about the club then appeared
in the Boston Evening Transcript and the Boston Journal. Cows
accused Brewer of writing them. Brewer denied that.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
In the August eighteen seventy eight issue of American Naturalists,
there was an article by Elliot Cows called the ineligibility
of the European house sparrow in America. He began, quote,
it is very regrettable that the sparrow question, which has
already become a matter of national moment, should have degenerated
into such a miserable personal controversy between the sentimentalists who

(23:09):
misrepresent the facts, and the ornithologists who understand them, that
a prudent person, whatever his views, might refrain from having
anything to do with it. After describing it as the
conscientious discharge of his duty to lay out all the facts,
Cows continued, quote, I do not write for ornithologists. So
far as I am aware, there is not a scientific

(23:31):
ornithologist in America among those who have expressed any decided
opinion who are in favor of the wretched interlopers which
we have so thoughtlessly introduced and played with and cuddled
like a parcel of hysterical slate pencil eating schoolgirls. He
then went on to insult Brewer specifically, although without naming him, quote,

(23:53):
I am in position to affirm that the sneers, the invectives,
the ridicule and abuse, and the wildest assertions of the
leader or leaders of the pro Sparrow faction result from
a frantic despair in the face of the facts which
ornithologists coolly adduce. With that out of the way, he
characterized the Sparrow's defenders as quote, first, those who know

(24:15):
nothing and care nothing particularly about them, except that they
rather like the pert and brusque familiarity of the birds,
a class composed chiefly of children, women, and old fogies. Secondly,
those who are or were instrumental in getting the birds here,
and are interested either in reputation or in pocket to
keep them here. Thirdly, quasi ornithologists who have been misled

(24:40):
into hasty expressions of opinion to which they feel bound
to stick. Fourthly, the clackers of the last, who play
a sort of Simon says up game. Fifthly, a very
few intelligent and scientific persons, but not practical nor professional ornithologists,
who recognize fully what little good the sparrow undeniably does,

(25:01):
and shape a favorable argument, mainly from the undisputed advantages
which result from a certain, just and proper number of
sparrows in Europe. Cows then offered five arguments against the
house sparrow. They don't do the thing they were imported
to do, which was eat all the caterpillars. They attack, harass,
and sometimes kill native birds. They destroy things like kitchen

(25:24):
gardens and grain fields. Quote, they are personally obnoxious and
unpleasant to many persons. And lastly, they have no natural
enemies than nothing to check their spread. There's a great
quote from point four, which reads quote I am not
a delicate woman, nor yet a squeamish man to be
shocked by their perpetual antics during the spring and summer.

(25:46):
Being something of an anatomist, I can stand it without embarrassment.
But all are not thus constituted.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
He also threw in another dig at Brewer, again without
naming him, quote, Let the authorities of any of our
large cities, preferably Boston, where the birds are said to
have done so much good, and where the sparrow combination
talks loudest, furnished to proper persons, say five hundred sparrows,
whose stomachs shall be examined by some competent botanist and

(26:16):
entomologist together. Cows ended the article by recommending that the
birds be left to take care of themselves, so people
should not feed them, put up bird houses to protect them,
or kill their predators, and he advised that any laws
protecting how sparrows should be repealed. That way, if, for example,
boy Scouts wanted to start a sparrow killing project, nothing

(26:38):
would get in their way. Cows was also.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
Insulting Brewer in his personal correspondence on May nineteenth, eighteen
seventy nine, he sent Ja Allen the following poem quote,
there was an old person of Beacon Street, of whom
history itself doth repeat, that he stood on his head
till the sparrow's all said. It is quite an anonymous
feat that September Cows published on the present status of

(27:03):
Passer domesticus in America, with special reference to the Western
States and territories. This was sort of an annotated bibliography
of the Sparrow controversy, including his own publications Brewers and
that of several others. Cows makes his opinions about Brewer
very clear, for example, describing an anonymous piece that he
attributed to Brewer as quote one of doctor Brewer's most

(27:27):
amusing tirades, and Cows described his own the ineligibility of
the European House Sparrow in America as quote a general
statement of the case indicting the sparrow with specific charges
and recommendations. Yeah, just to be super clear, that's that piece.
We just read a bunch of really insulting passages from
where he insulted all kinds of people.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Listen, it's just a general statement of the case. Uh.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
About four months after Cows published this article. Brewer died,
so unfortunately we don't have like a point by point
rebuttal from him. He passed away three years after that.
Cows accepted that it was not possible to eradicate the
house sparrow in North America, writing that he quote led
the sparrow war for twenty years that only surrendered to

(28:17):
the inevitable. Cows did not stop criticizing Brewer, though. In
eighteen eighty nine, the USDA Division of Economic Ornithology and
Mammalogy issued its first bulletin, which was a four hundred
page report on what was then called the English sparrow.
Cows didn't think the bulletin gave him enough credit, which
apparently revived his animosity toward Brewer. In eighteen ninety, a

(28:41):
new addition to his Key to North American Birds was published,
which revised the description of the house sparrow to include quote,
well informed persons denounce the bird without avail during the
years when it might have been abated. But further protest
is futile, for the sparrows have it all their own
way and can afford to le legislature like rats, mice, cockroaches,

(29:03):
and other parasites of the human race which we have imported.
In eighteen ninety seven, after becoming editor of an ornithology
magazine called The Osprey, Cows wrote a regular feature called
Doctor Cows's Column, and in one of those he called
Brewer quote a narrow minded, prejudiced, tactlest person. When people

(29:23):
criticized him as being in poor taste for writing that,
he doubled down, saying Quote, the harm he did was
incalculable and his name deserves to be stigmatized as long
as there is a sparrow left in the United States
to shriek Brewer Brewer Brewer, then Cows died two years later.
When Brewer and Cows were writing about the qualities and

(29:46):
behavior of how sparrows, both of them were mostly dealing
in anecdotes. Neither of them had much data to back
up the actual impact of these birds on North America.
It was true that the sparrows didn't eat as many
caterpillars sus expected, and that they ate grain and other crops,
and that they chirped a lot, and that they picked
seeds out of manure. It was also true that they

(30:08):
attacked and killed nesting birds, including bluebirds, and we know
today that they can carry diseases such as West Nile
virus and salmonella. But these same things are also true
of other birds, including other birds that are native to
North America. And when it comes to predation, so many
other animals also prey on nesting birds. But the response

(30:30):
to house sparrows became particularly hostile, and this was connected
to how people talked about them. In the nineteenth century,
people were describing house sparrows in much the same way
that they were describing human immigrants to the United States,
and this was a period of increasing nativism and xenophobia.

(30:50):
Both house sparrows and human immigrants were described as dirty
and lazy. They made too much noise, they had too
many babies. They were going to take over the country,
overwhelming the native bird population or the white population that
hailed from the so called right parts of Europe.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
This was not just a coincidental use of similar language.
It was connected to how people saw these birds. For example,
in eighteen ninety seven, Elliot Cows co authored a book
called Citizen Bird, which was about birds and nature, but
also about values like citizenship. It used sparrows as an
example of bad citizens, including the passage quote they increased

(31:30):
very fast and spread everywhere, quarreling with and driving out
the good citizens who belonged to the regular birdland guilds,
taking their homes and making themselves nuisances. The wise men
protested against bringing these sparrows, but no one heeded their
warning until it was too late. Now it is decided
that these sparrows are bad citizens and criminals, so they

(31:52):
are condemned by everyone.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
This use of language was also connected to the eugenics movement,
so a while later and nineteen thirty for example, eugenicist
and conservationist C. M. Gaety equated immigration to the United
States from Mexico with the quote sparrow problem, describing the
quote songless immigrant as displacing American birds that were quote songsters,

(32:17):
insects destroyers, weed seed eaters. He continued by saying that
the quote old type American is similarly being displaced with
Mexican slum inhabitants.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
As another example, architect Philip Johnson published an article titled
are we a Dying People in July of nineteen thirty nine,
by which point eugenics was falling out of favor in
the United States, but had been adopted and expanded by
Nazi Germany. This article was about the idea that white
people were not having enough babies and that quote, the

(32:49):
United States of America is committing race suicide. It's said
in part quote. The course of nature is not predestined.
Human will is a part of the biological process us.
Our will, for example, interferes constantly in the world of
lower animals. When English sparrows threaten to drive out our songbirds,
we shoot the sparrows rather than letting nature and Darwin

(33:11):
take their course. Thus, the songbirds, thanks to our will,
become the fittest and survive. So of course, language like
this is still around today. It still shows up in
conversations about immigration, and it still shows up in conversations
about all kinds of non native species, including European starlings,

(33:32):
which were intentionally introduced to North America decades after how
sparrows were long after people had decided that the house
sparrows were a problem and should not have been introduced.
And people still have extremely strong feelings about how sparrows,
especially when it comes to their killing other birds or
driving them from their nests. Today, how sparrows are widespread

(33:55):
over most of North America and part of South America,
umber seem to have declined in recent decades, and they
seem to be declining in Europe and Asia as well.
The reasons for this are not entirely clear. Some possibilities
include disease, pollution, changing climate, and changes in the food
that is available to them. Also, we mentioned earlier in

(34:17):
the episode that John James Audubon had named a couple
of birds after Brewer. There's been an ongoing discussion about
renaming eponymously named birds in the United States. On November one,
twenty twenty three, the American Ornithological Society announced that it
was committing to changing all English language bird names within

(34:37):
its jurisdiction for birds that are named after people or
whose names are otherwise offensive or exclusionary. In the words
of the Society's Executive director and CEO, doctor Judas scarl Quote,
there has been historic bias in how birds are named
and who might have a bird named in their honor.
Exclusionary naming conventions developed in the eighteen hundreds, clouded by

(34:59):
racism and misogyny, don't work for us today, and the
time has come for us to transform this process and
redirect the focus to the birds where it belongs. I
don't know if there is a similar movement regarding animals,
but there is one at least that I know of,
which is the Cou's whitetailed deer, right, which is named

(35:22):
after Elliott Cows, but most people say it cous. So
if you know about these deer and you think we've
been saying his name wrong this whole time, uh, the
deer technically also pronounced cows, but nobody really says it
that way. This is how language evolves, which then brings
up a different thing of like, well, it might be
named after him, but no one calls it by his

(35:43):
actual name. Do we still need to change it?

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Yeah? Well, uh, yeah, I don't know. And as I said,
I have no idea if there's been a similar discussion
about the names of non bird species. I have some
listener made before we finish up today. This is from Shelley,
and Shelley wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I just listened

(36:06):
to your behind the scenes about the metric system and
had to write in I'm a middle school math and
science teacher, and the experiences about math classes both of
you shared really resonated with me, both from personal experience
and what I learned in grad school about the history
of math education in the US. Allie, what you shared
about the trauma of timed multiplication tests is a really

(36:26):
common experience. It's when most people in this country identify
as when I stopped liking math. Joe Baller, professor of
mathematics education at Stanford, calls US a math traumatized nation
as a result of the emphasis on speed and memorization
over understanding for so many years in our education system.
I can tell you the day I started liking math.

(36:47):
It was the day we used the quadratic equation in
high school chemistry, because I finally saw both the purpose
of math and why it worked the way it did.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
I also wanted.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
To share this article by Joe Baller and Lang Chen
and The Atlantic, why kids should use their fingers in
math class. Tracy, I hope it helps you feel better
about using your fingers for arithmetic. They're one of the
best tools for math we as humans have. Thanks for
all the great work you do on the podcast The
History of Science episodes are my favorites. Cheers, Shelley. Thank

(37:17):
you so much, Shelley for this email. I had not
seen that article and I was only able to kind
of skim it this morning, But man, boy, do I
wish there had been some encouragement about, you know, how
to use your fingers to learn math better rather than
just like being yelled.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
At to stop doing it. Right. Oh, I remember the
policing of it in one of my elementary school math
classes during a test where the teacher literally was like,
if I see you using your fingers under the desk,
you will fail the test. And it's like, yeah, you're
just thinking us all more scared of math, right. And
I have long suspected that one of the reasons I

(37:57):
had trouble with arithmetic is I really liked, like we
would have little bears to count and sort into different
colors and things like that, and anything involved like counting
the bears or counting numbers of things, like adding things
when there were objects there representing the things, right, that
was fine. But when I needed to move into the

(38:18):
abstract of doing it in my head, like I just
was not able to make that bridge very well. So
thank you so much for sending that article. If anybody
else wants to google it again, and it's called why
kids should use their fingers in math class? If you
would like to send us a note about this or
any other podcast or at history Podcasts. At iHeartRadio dot com,

(38:39):
we're on social media and missed in History and you
can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and
wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(38:59):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M

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