Country Life
By IAN NIALL
YESTERDAY I watched a small and hungry company of sparrows hard at work devouring the leaves of carnations and pinks in our garden. They were mak- ing the most of a bit of greenstuff, perhaps because they were tired of the too monotonous diet of bread which we had put out for them. House sparrows are omnivorous, for insects, seeds, bread, fat and green- stuff all come alike to them, and it often surprises me that an outright campaign has never been started against them. They are, after all, no farther away than the eaves of almost every town and village dwelling and should be easier to eradicate than rats or mice. We nevertheless shelter them without much protest, although much to the detriment of farm and garden endeavour. I was talking to the head gardener of an estate today and he said he regarded them as greater rogues than field mice, in spite of the fact that he had recently trapped no fewer than forty of the latter on a single bed six feet wide and twenty feet long. The mice, he suggested, often get what the sparrows don't, even when it comes to newly planted peas. Field mice, in my opinion, take a lot of beating, for they burrow for bulbs and tunnel from one setting to the next. They also multiply at a healthy rate and it is hard to say which is the greater pest, even when the sparroW has three broods and such catholic taste in food.
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