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For far too long there has been a bird that North American birders have mocked, derided, persecuted, hated, and, perhaps worse of all, ignored.  It is a common bird, seen in cities, suburbs, and agricultural lands.  One reason it is so widely disliked is its ubiquity, another is the fact that it is an introduced [...]

New York City, June 2008 The title of this post pretty much says it all. A couple of weeks ago I watched and photographed a young House Sparrow getting fed by its mother. I also watched, but failed to get pictures of, the same young bird being fed by two different male House Sparrows. These [...]

Residents of the Americas may find this hard to believe, but the ubiquitous, adaptable House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is declining in its native lands. We should all be concerned about this, if not out of love for this prosaic passerine then because the sparrow may very well be a signal species for more encompassing environmental [...]

In this post, we shall celebrate the beauty and variation of a veritable wood-warbler whose taxonomic inclusion into this glamorous group has been overlooked far too long, whose charisma has thus tragically and largely gone unnoticed and whose beauty has been severely under…   mis…   err …  [coughs] estimated wrongly until very recently. Ladies and Gentlemen, [...]

Though it may seem insane to American readers, as well as to any other people who view the House Sparrow as an invasive pest, in its home range Passer domesticus is on the wane.  In response to the decline last year saw the first ever World Sparrow Day and tomorrow, 20 March, is the second [...]

A story in pictures…roll over the images for pop-up captions. Once the female House Sparrow was driven off the males turned to fighting each other: Too bad for the House Sparrows that a European Starling was waiting in the wings: All of the pictures were taken in Kissena Park in Queens last weekend. And, no, [...]

When I got home from work today I realized that I needed to brush my cats, especially B.B., the long-haired one.  The male Northern Cardinal who has been ruling my balcony was not pleased with the disruption to his feeding schedule and let me know it by perching in the budding maple tree that has [...]