Behold the most despised bird in human history You know the one It’s that small brown bird that boldly hops about on sidewalks pecking at dried-up bits of hot-dog bun The one that chirps monotonously and loudly outside your bedroom window The one you sometimes see flying around inside airports or shopping malls Yes that one the House Sparrow For more than ten thousand years this bird has lived alongside us and nowhere else And for just as long we have tried to get rid of it Yet worldwide at least half a billion House Sparrows still survive So why is it not yet extinct like the Passenger Pigeon or the Great Auk Part of the answer is that the House Sparrow has always been like us one of the most adaptable creatures on Earth
Long long ago in prehistoric times there was another kind of sparrow that lived in the Middle East Like other birds this one nested in the wild It also migrated every year Then around twelve thousand years ago something in its neighborhood changed The mammal that walked upright stopped roaming around and wonder of wonders it started growing the sparrow’s favorite food Grain The early sparrow quickly changed its habits It began building its nests in cavities in human shelters instead of in trees near the fields of wheat and oats that people were now cultivating With such plentiful food the sparrow no longer needed to migrate Soon it lost the knack for long-distance flying altogether and rarely ventured more than a couple of miles from where it had hatched places that were now always near humans It had become the House Sparrow
