The Great English Sparrow War

00:00:01
Speaker 1: 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.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: 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 Mao Zedong's four Pests campaign, which involved trying to eradicate spars.

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

00:00:43
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: Sort of prodding me about it.

00:01:24
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 political writer of unusual ability.

00:02:32
Speaker 1: 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. The Waterbirds of North America was also published, but posthumously.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: 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.

00:03:17
Speaker 1: 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 US Geological and Geographical Survey of the territories in the eighteen seventies.

00:05:56
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

00:13:06
Speaker 1: 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 first really successful effort was likely in Portland, Maine, in eighteen fifty four.

00:13:33
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:14:15
Speaker 1: 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 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. If you're thinking something about this poem feels a little racist to me, we're gonna get to that later.

00:15:09
Speaker 2: 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 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 Brewer came to the house sparrow's defense in Atlantic Monthly, writing, quote, the sparrow is not all evil.

00:15:59
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

00:20:09
Speaker 2: 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 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 doing those things, and had in fact seen the opposite.

00:21:00
Speaker 1: 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. 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, 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 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 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.

00:22:45
Speaker 2: 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. Being something of an anatomist, I can stand it without embarrassment. But all are not thus constituted.

00:25:52
Speaker 1: 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 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 would get in their way. Cows was also.

00:26:41
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:27:48
Speaker 1: Listen, it's just a general statement of the case. Uh.

00:27:54
Speaker 2: 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

00:31:07
Speaker 1: 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 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 are condemned by everyone.

00:31:54
Speaker 2: 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, insects destroyers, weed seed eaters. He continued by saying that the quote old type American is similarly being displaced with Mexican slum inhabitants.

00:32:29
Speaker 1: 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 actual name. Do we still need to change it?

00:35:46
Speaker 2: 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 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 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. 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.

00:36:55
Speaker 1: I also wanted.

00:36:56
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:37:34
Speaker 1: 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 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 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, 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, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M