For another, the first evidence of the house sparrow does not come from Europe. Our geography defines its fate more than any specific requirements of climate or habitat. For one thing, the house sparrow depends on humans to such an extent it might be more reasonable to say it is native to humanity rather than to some particular region. Many field guides call the house sparrow the European house sparrow or the English sparrow and describe it as being native to Europe, but it is not native to Europe, not really. The other problem with sparrows is that the story of their marriage with humanity is ancient and so, like our own story, only partially known. More biologists study the species of the remote Galapagos Islands than the common species of, say, Manhattan. Even scientists tend to ignore common species, choosing instead to study the far away and rare. Common species are, almost by definition, a bother, damaging and in their sheer numbers, ugly. Being common is, if not quite a sin, a kind of vulgarity from which we would rather look away.

We tend to regard common species poorly, if at all. Part of the difficulty of telling the story of house sparrows is their commonness. None of this is precisely wrong, but none of it is precisely right, either. If asked to describe a house sparrow, many bird biologists would describe it as a small, ubiquitous brown bird, originally native to Europe and then introduced to the Americas and elsewhere around the world, where it became a pest of humans, a kind of brown-winged rat. They have been spotted breeding nearly 2,000 feet underground in a mine in Yorkshire, England. House sparrows have been seen feeding on the 80th floor of the Empire State Building. It is found throughout Northern Africa, Europe, the Americas and much of Asia and is almost certainly more abundant than humans. Passer domesticus is one of the most common animals in the world.

Even if you don’t know it, you have probably been surrounded by house sparrows your entire life.

The sparrow