Avian architects: Technology,domestication,and animal minds in urban America

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus) was introduced to the United States, quickly spreading across the country. For a brief period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the observation of sparrow behavior was something of an urban pastime. Traits such as intelligence, reason, persistence, and craftsmanship were conferred onto sparrows by American urbanites. This paper argues that sparrow intelligence was often conflated with domestication: the ability of the birds to adapt to living alongside humans. Praise for the ingenuity of sparrows generally revolved around their nest building, particularly when such structures overcame the challenges posed by urban infrastructure and technology. Sparrows were far less praiseworthy when they caused electricity outages or contaminated water supplies. The sparrow in the United States demonstrates how the relationship between these anecdotes and their implications for animal minds was mediated by the technology and infrastructure of cities. Admirers of sparrows were not measuring the birds’ mental capacity, but rather their ability to adapt to human habitations. Sparrows were only granted intelligence once they had demonstrated their ability to become domesticated.

On April 26th, 1885, the New York Times reprinted a story from Hartford, Connecticut. A house sparrow (Passer domesticus) nest had been discovered in the town after a cloth awning, which had been folded away for winter, was let down on Main Street. “It was a perfect little nest,” exclaimed the paper, “and its arrangement was striking.” The nest resembled a swing, with the main structure hanging in the middle of a long string. One end of this string was fastened to a pole on the edge of the awning, while the other was attached to a metal ring in the brickwork of the building from which the awning hung. “In order to make the string hold fast in this ring,” explained the New York Times, “it appeared to human vision as a necessity that it should be wound around twice; the instinct of the birds was equal to the mechanical situation.” The sparrows had met this challenge, fastening their nest by securely winding the string twice around the ring. If we read between the lines of this warming anecdote, some late nineteenth-century ambiguities around animal intelligence and how it could best be observed and measured begin to emerge. We are told that the avian builders of the Hartford nest faced a “mechanical” problem that humans would also have met by repeatedly wrapping a piece of string around a ring. ¹ Yet it was the birds’ instinct that allowed them to solve this engineering challenge. Did sparrows solve problems with intelligence or instinct? Were they aware of their actions or acting subconsciously? Did they possess something akin to human reasoning?

Following the animal turn in the humanities and natural sciences, such questions are viewed from a fresh perspective that erodes the divisions between human and nonhuman and attributes greater agency and mental ability to animals. ² Looming over the late nineteenth century and beyond, however, is the specter of Morgan’s canon. Devised by the British psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan in 1894, the canon decrees that: “In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development.” ³ Simply put, the canon exhorted scientists not to interpret complex animal behavior as evidence of intelligence when instinct or learned behavior would suffice. The canon was closely related to a series of ongoing debates, including the division between mind and matter and the origins of language and reason. ⁴ However, part of Morgan’s rationale for introducing it was his desire to develop a professional science of comparative psychology, dislodging the traditional “natural history approach to animal behavior” and dismissing the “hordes of unworthy amateurs” who contributed subjective observations to learned publications. ⁵ The tensions that gave rise to the canon – over the definition and nature of such loaded terms as reason, intelligence, and instinct – therefore were not confined to an elite school of British philosophers and psychologists. Discussions of whether animals possessed intelligence or reason were not confined to the laboratory or university but occurred in a range of different environments.

One of these environments was the urban space. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the modern city was a theater in which animal minds were measured and judged. One opportunity for human–animal interaction came with the introduction of the house sparrow to New York in the early 1850s. ⁶ The sparrow’s arrival was part of the nineteenth-century acclimatization movement, which saw plants and animals deemed useful or ornamental shipped around the globe and introduced into new environments. ⁷ Natural history and civic societies were instrumental in these introductions. Sparrows were introduced under the auspices of the Brooklyn Institute and its director, Nicholas Pike. ⁸ Further sparrow introductions were carried out by Eugene Schieffelin, who, as chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, may also have participated in the introduction of the European starling during the 1890s (though the bird may have already been naturalized in the United States since the 1870s). ⁹ Game birds were also imported following the successful introduction of the ring-necked pheasant in Oregon in 1889. ¹⁰

Sparrows, meanwhile, spread quickly across the United States. By 1880, the birds could be found along the entire east coast and by 1910 were present in almost the entirety of the United States. ¹¹ Controversy erupted over their presence, largely driven by concerns that sparrows were damaging to agriculture. The birds were also suited to urban environments, having spent the past 10,000 years evolving into a commensal relationship with human settlements. ¹² In American cities, which, thanks to habitat loss and egg collecting, were increasingly devoid of birdlife, the behavior and character of the sparrow came under increasing human scrutiny. ¹³ A great deal of this was negative, with Americans complaining that sparrows were too noisy, were dirty, and drove away native birds. However, the interaction of sparrows with urban technology and infrastructure also gave rise to numerous natural history observations, which suggested that the birds were comparable to engineers or architects with problem-solving skills.

This paper argues that the inhabitants of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American towns and cities were not actually judging sparrows’ intelligence, but instead their level of domestication. Scholars are familiar with the concept of humans domesticating nonhuman animals by breeding companion animals and livestock. ¹⁴ As Jørgensen argues, however, in its broadest sense, “domestication” simply refers to the making of someone or something part of the domus, or home. Under this definition, wild animals can, in a sense, domesticate themselves as they seek new homes in cities. Animals do not distinguish between artificial and natural structures and quickly appropriate technology designated by humans for other uses. ¹⁵ Bats nest under bridges and in attics, while birds live under eaves and in birdhouses. This is a kind of domestication, as urban animals make their homes among human technology. ¹⁶ This propensity can generate interactions between birdlife and urban technologies from which it can be tempting to speculate about animal cognition. Drawing upon archival sources and contemporary books, newspapers, and periodicals, this paper explores how the inner life of birds was understood in the late nineteenth-century United States and how the interaction of sparrows with urban phenomena resulted in numerous judgments on their intelligence, reasoning, and even aesthetic sensibilities. Sparrows and their mental abilities were praised when the birds were able to adapt to urban infrastructure and technology in a manner that did not adversely impact human users. Innovation was not praised when the birds fouled water systems or stripped electric wires for nest building. Sparrow intelligence was only valued when the birds domesticated themselves in a way that did not inconvenience humans.

This paper examines the interaction between human perceptions of sparrow intelligence and the urban environment in three parts. The first explores how evidence of bird intelligence was seen in many aspects of avian lives, from migration and song to laboratory tests and nest building. However, many of these indicators did not apply to sparrows. The entry of Morgan’s canon into psychology also led to doubt over whether animal behavior should be interpreted as evidence of cognition or instinct. The second part of this paper describes instances when urban sparrows were praised for their ingenuity, which largely centered upon instances of nest building. The third focuses upon instances of disastrous encounters between the birds and urban infrastructure and technology. These negative encounters were often gruesome. Sparrows became entangled or trapped, electrocuted themselves, or drowned in bodies of water. In such cases, no praise was offered for their novel behavior. The birds were applauded, however, when they succeeded in extracting themselves or others from such predicaments. Estimates of sparrow intelligence were often dependent on how well the birds integrated themselves into cities.

How to gauge avian intelligence

Is it possible to tell whether a bird is intelligent or not? Gauging what is going on inside the mind of another, particularly a nonhuman animal, is no easy task. One American who grappled with this question during the late nineteenth century was Arthur Lincoln Reagh, who graduated as a doctor of medicine from Harvard in 1894 and took up a position as a bacteriologist in the Massachusetts State Department of Health. Reagh was interested in ornithology and was elected to the Nuttall Ornithological Club in 1891. His influence on the science, however, was somewhat meager. “Apparently his only contribution to ‘The Auk’ [the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union],” wrote Theodore Sherman Palmer, economic biologist at the United States Department of Agriculture, in Reagh’s obituary, “was a brief note on the occurrence of the King Rail [Rallus elegans] in Plymouth Co., Mass., in 1903.” ¹⁷ Reagh, however, did leave another legacy: a set of notes on the behavior and minds of birds. In them, he identified several aspects of avian behavior that could potentially be construed as evidence of intelligence, particularly socialization, song, and nest building. Reagh’s writings provide a valuable overview of how avian minds could be thought about. However, some of these abilities were inapplicable to sparrows, while others were dismissed as examples of avian instinct in the wake of Morgan’s canon.

For Reagh, the study of live birds and their behavior was quite novel. In private notes that most likely date to the mid-1890s, Reagh described his research as “bird sociology.” He depicted this as “a new kind of study,” in contrast to what he termed the “old way” of collecting specimens. Later, in 1902, the zoologist William Morton Wheeler would use “ethology” to describe the study of animal intelligence and habits and to distinguish its advocates from laboratory-based experimentalists. ¹⁸ Reagh did not have a coherent program for how bird societies should be studied, instead brainstorming such keywords as “Relations,” “Life needs,” and “Protection.” ¹⁹ Like many of his contemporaries, Reagh also believed that avian socialization was closely linked to birdsong. For some naturalists, the sophistication of avian communication implied that birds possessed intelligence. Thomas G. Gentry, an American naturalist who frequently claimed to see intelligence in nature, argued in 1900 that bird calls were understood between and across species. Describing a clash between a pair of robins and a pair of house sparrows, Gentry described how a “war-cry” emitted by the embattled sparrows “not only summoned help to their standard, but it was equally understood by all the other birds of the neighborhood, who flocked to the defence of their brethren [the robins] against the alien.” ²⁰ From Gentry’s perspective, this demonstrated that birds recognized individual calls, understood their meaning, and could formulate a response to the information they contained.

Yet Morgan’s canon gave an alternative interpretation of such occurrences, with its advocates arguing that birdsong was an example of “instinct,” or “inherited memory,” at work. ²¹ The British naturalist Frederick Webb Headley criticized those who saw humanlike thoughts or motives in bird behavior, quipping that the ancient poets who described the song of the nightingale as melancholy were “like a German commentator who reads profundities into the simplest line of Shakespeare.” He believed that birds sang purely by instinct. The fact that young birds were able to imitate the song of their parents so quickly indicated “that to speak of their learning it [song] by instruction is absurd.” Headley argued that Morgan had demonstrated that the behavior of young birds was largely informed by instinct and learning from experience, citing an 1893 experiment conducted by Morgan on chicks. The newly hatched chicks learned what to eat by instinctively pecking at anything within range. When an unpalatable or inedible food was introduced, even if similar in appearance to something they had previously enjoyed, the chicks learned to reject it. ²²

Nest building was another behavior that attracted claims and counterclaims of avian intelligence. The Bostonian editor and poet Henry Coyle was fascinated by the “architecture of birds,” which he found “exceedingly ingenious.” Writing in 1894, he compared different styles of nest building with the “mechanical employments” of mining, masonry, and carpentry. The bottle-nested sparrow found in India, for example, was “a basket maker” and “a very intelligent bird.” Its nests were constructed of long grasses woven together to form a bottle-shaped nest which hung from the branches of balm trees. These bottles were subdivided into several compartments, with sections for eggs, food storage, and sleeping space. Coyle was impressed by the “ingenuity” with which these nests were assembled, and the “neatness and delicacy” of the bottle-nested sparrow’s “workmanship.” ²³ Not everyone agreed with his interpretation. Headley, the British advocate of Morgan, claimed that inbuilt faculties (which were awakened in young birds by their parents) directed nest building. As proof, he asked readers to imagine the impossibility of teaching a bird to build something other than its normal nest. Even if it were possible to teach a house sparrow or wood pigeon to build “a neat nest of any kind,” argued Headley, “it would at any rate require much time, whereas just a hint, if even that is required, is enough to set a bird off building as its parents have built before.” ²⁴

Morgan’s canon suggested that nest building did not require the attribution of higher psychological processes to birds. Reagh, aware of the divide between advocates of avian instinct and advocates of avian intelligence, developed his own grand theory of “ornithological psychology.” He suggested that the cumulative evidence of song, aesthetic appreciation, migration, and “architecture” demonstrated that birds possessed a blend of instinct and intelligence. Dismissing the distinction between these two traits as the “old view,” Reagh argued that the physical evolution of species must be accompanied by mental evolution, a process that marked the “beginnings of mind[s] like ours.” That said, instinct played a larger role in the ability of birds to build nests than intelligence. “Birds do not have to learn about nest-building and migrating,” wrote Reagh in the 1890s. They were instead dependent on “heredity” to inherit the unconscious actions required to quickly construct nests. ²⁵

Morgan’s canon did not completely permeate every aspect of American ornithology. Nature writing around nest building, with its anthropomorphized themes of craftmanship and architecture, remained relatively immune. As late as 1919, Albert Field Gilmore described bank swallows and kingfishers as “among the wisest of birds, so far as selecting a safe home site is concerned.” A Christian Scientist and member of the American Ornithologists’ Union, Gilmore explained how these birds built long tunnels into sand banks on the sides of rivers, culminating in a chamber where the birds could nest safely away from predators. “These birds,” he concluded, “may be classed as good engineers.” Even if writers like Gilmore did not explicitly lay out the relationship between nest building and intelligence, they did develop an analogy between the reasoned plans of human builders and their avian counterparts.

What did these debates mean for the house sparrow? The introduction of Morgan’s canon made it difficult to demonstrate avian intelligence. Morgan’s supporter Frederick Webb Headley was held in great esteem by leading American ornithologists. Theodore Sherman Palmer, who wrote dismissively of Reagh’s contributions to ornithology, stated that Headley was known to American readers “by his admirable books on ‘The Structure and Life of Birds,’ 1895, and ‘The Flight of Birds,’ 1912.” ²⁶ Proving that sparrows possessed sophisticated mental faculties was made more difficult by the nature of the birds themselves. As we have seen, some indicators of avian intelligence included behaviors like song, migration, and nest building. The song of sparrows was seen as relatively simple compared to that of other birds, consisting of a series of repetitive “chirps,” which drove some ornithologists to distraction. The leading opponent of sparrows in the United States, Elliott Coues, called them “noise-nuisances.” “He [the sparrow] has no song that may be called such,” agreed American ornithologist William Rogers Lord in 1901, “mostly putting forth a querulous sort of cry.” ²⁷ Nor did sparrows migrate, meaning that they could not demonstrate impressive navigational skills. In their natural state, the nests of house sparrows were also uninspiring. Gilmore described them as large constructs made from whatever came to hand, including grasses, roots, and wool. ²⁸

Yet there were some environments in which sparrows excelled. One was the laboratory. In 1901, James P. Porter, a psychologist at Indiana University, began to put sparrows through a rigorous battery of tests. His aim was to discover whether the sparrow was “more intelligent than the birds he has driven out” in the United States, thereby providing a biological justification for the European colonization of the Americas. The birds had already shown themselves to be adaptable in their nesting sites. “I have seen a male sparrow,” claimed Porter, “do his best to persuade a female that a hole in an electric-light pole was the very best place for a nest.” He began his experiments by placing a food box outside for roaming sparrows. To get the food, the birds had to pull a string that would lift the catch holding the door of the box shut. Several birds succeeded in accomplishing this feat. In other laboratory-based tests, sparrows were less impressive, failing to recognize and track a triangular box containing food amid a row of differently shaped containers. They could, however, distinguish colors. Porter concluded that sparrows could learn quickly and imitate others. Yet it was their persistence that was their most distinguishing feature. “He is persistency itself,” remarked Porter. “This agrees well with his popular reputation and it certainly seems to me now that the English Sparrow owes much of his biological success to this strenuous characteristic.” ²⁹

A second environment that hosted claims and counterclaims of sparrow intelligence was the urban space. Porter’s laboratory tests had shown how the birds could overcome novel artificial challenges. The mechanical boxes, mazes, and unfamiliar shapes and colors of the laboratory were comparable to the challenges sparrows would face when encountering the new technologies and infrastructure of town and city. One of Porter’s influences was Alfred Brehm’s famous zoological treatise Brehms Tierleben, which argued that sparrows only entered their true milieu when in the city. “Accordingly he [the sparrow],” wrote Brehm, “is an entirely different bird in the city from what he is in the country.” ³⁰ Urban sparrows learned from experience and were capable of distinguishing what was useful from what was harmful. Their “natural” instinct could only go so far in a human-built and rapidly changing environment, with its cars, trains, electrical wires, water systems, and other forms of technology. In the years around the introduction of Morgan’s canon, the cityscape provided a rich source of anecdotal observations of sparrow intelligence.

Intelligent sparrows in the town and city

Sparrows quickly demonstrated their ability to integrate themselves into towns and cities. In 1875, a shed in Newark, New York, was home to so many sparrow nests that “a quarter of a ton of hay” had been used in its construction, according to an estimate from the New York Times. “Think of the industry of these little architects,” the paper urged, “who have built this immense family hotel, strand by strand, just as the bricklayer laid one brick upon another to form the building whose walls shield the sparrows from wind and storm.” ³¹ New York had been the site of the first sparrow introductions to the United States in the early 1850s. Other cities quickly followed suit. Sparrows were released from Boston to Galveston, Philadelphia to Salt Lake City. The birds, which were thought to consume unwanted insects in American parks and boulevards, were held up as symbols of progress and civic service. In New York’s Union Square Park, a government-funded sparrow “hotel” was surrounded by admiring onlookers. ³² Although the American love affair with the sparrow was short-lived, the bird did provide numerous opportunities for urban Americans to observe its behavior.

At the end of the nineteenth century, stories of innovative sparrow architecture began to appear. In 1890, the New York Times told the story of the town clock of Sarnia, in Ontario, Canada. Early on a weekday morning, the clock had stopped. Its caretaker, a Mr. Williams, found that the hands of the clock had been tied together by twine and grass. The culprits were a pair of sparrows, who had built their nest between the two hands of the clock. To prevent the hands from moving and disturbing their nest, the sparrows had tied them together. “The engineering skill displayed by the birds in accomplishing their object showed that they possessed reasoning power of no mean order,” argued the paper, “besides an amount of industry and perseverance in gathering the material within the few hours at their disposal that is almost incredible.” ³³ In New York, at least, this episode won the Canadian sparrows plaudits for their intelligence and persistence. Stopping a town clock in the early hours of the morning did not inconvenience most of the human inhabitants of Sarnia, with the exception of Mr. Williams, who had to labor for hours to remove the sparrows’ handiwork.

Further down the east coast, sparrows integrated themselves into the fabric of American cities. In Washington, a Masonic temple constructed after the Civil War was targeted by sparrows as “especially adapted to nest-building.” Its cornices gave protection from the elements, while “numerous scrolls and brackets, with a narrow ledge below, furnish excellent foundations for ornithological architecture.” ³⁴ In 1896, shortly after the introduction of Morgan’s canon, another example of sparrows building their nests in awnings emerged from Philadelphia. An anonymous resident had let down the awning over their office window. As they did so, an egg fell from the awning and smashed upon the ground. Over the course of a few days, the office owner noticed a flurry of activity from sparrows around the awning. When they left their office one night to draw the awning back in, they found that the cords they needed to use to do so had been cut. “Investigation revealed the fact that the intelligent little sparrows had rebuilt their nest in the folds of the awning,” they explained, “and in order to prevent a repetition of last week’s depredations had themselves severed the cord with their bills.” ³⁵

Condemnation and admiration of sparrows often appeared in the same place. An 1898 article in the Kansas City Journal, for instance, imitated official condemnation of the birds by labeling them a “feathered rowdy and unmitigated nuisance.” Yet its author also acknowledged that, when building their nests, “sparrows are industrious, intelligent and persistent.” While they stole whatever they could get their claws on – including straw, string, and cloth – for nestbuilding, they did so cooperatively, helping each other carry large pieces of material. Sparrows could get themselves into trouble, but also help one another. In New York, a sparrow returning to its nest with a long piece of string became entangled. Somehow, a group of sparrows came to the rescue and extracted their peer from its predicament. ³⁶ Other behaviors were less welcome. William Henry Hudson, an Anglo-Argentine ornithologist, described his frustration when sparrows nesting on his house began to take laburnum blossoms from a tree in his garden. The birds decorated their nest and played with the blossoms until the tree was “a forlorn and ragged sight.” Hudson was not sure whether this incident represented “mischievous propensities” or “aesthetic tastes.” In 1919, he argued that sparrows and other animals “far down in the organic scale” could be taught tricks, which “if performed by a dog, would be pronounced very clever indeed.” ³⁷

Other urban encounters with novel sparrow behaviors focused on food. Kentucky journalist and Confederate propagandist Henry Watterson did not think much of the sparrows’ intellect. In 1890, he observed a sparrow carrying a piece of bread onto a sloped roof. When the bird dropped its prize on the roof, the bread rolled off and fell back to the ground. The sparrow flew to retrieve it, only to repeat the same mistake again. “The English sparrow is not very smart,” declared Watterson, “with all the fuss he makes.” ³⁸ In the city, sparrows developed new means of accessing food sources. In Pittsburgh, reported the Washington Post in 1891, the “lazy” sparrows took advantage of the city’s electric arc lights. These spherical, open-topped lights attracted nocturnal insects. When the lights were turned off at sunrise, sparrows gathered to feast on the bounty. After the lamps cooled, “the bothersome scavengers slide down into the globes by way of the carbons [the carbon rods which supplied electricity to the open-topped globes] and eat the unfortunate insects.” The arc lamps were so popular that multiple birds often squeezed inside at the same time. ³⁹ Such was the disdain of the Post for sparrows, however, that the birds received no praise for their novel way of accessing insects.

The phenomenon of sparrows accessing arc lamps was also described by J. Harris Reed, a Philadelphia architect and founding member of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club. Reed had an eye for avian novelty, although it is difficult to gauge his views on bird intelligence. In an 1898 article for The Auk, Reed described encountering a field sparrow nest. It had been built between some stalks of rye about two feet above the ground. The smooth stalks of the rye meant that the nest had gradually slipped lower and lower. The field sparrow, however, was “determined to build it at the original height” and had kept adding material until the nest was a foot deep. “This was no doubt the result of poor judgment,” concluded Reed, “which is often seen among juvenile birds.” ⁴⁰ Birds, then, did possess judgment and could learn from experience. Reed noted house sparrows flitting in and out of the hoods covering arc lamps. He also observed purple martins and barn swallows accessing arc lamps in Atlantic City. ⁴¹ Reed held some avian minds in high regard; for instance, praising the “novel idea” of a tufted titmouse stealing mouthfuls of fur from the tail of a predatory squirrel to add to its nest. ⁴² Reed’s musings on animal minds may have caused him to fall out with members of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, as it “appeared that many of his [Reed’s] observations were tinged with an over-zealous desire to report the unusual.” ⁴³

Other avian strategies for acquiring food included the crushing of inedible grains using human transportation. In 1893, a sparrow in New York City was seen pushing a large piece of bread into the path of an incoming horsecar, flying back to eat the crumbs once the car had passed by. The Wichita Daily Eagle in Kansas saw this as evidence that birds “possessed reason,” a “wonderful intelligence,” and were not driven by “blind instinct alone.” ⁴⁴ At the Girard Point grain elevators in Philadelphia, an employee claimed in 1903 that sparrows were faced with the problem of eating hard kernels of corn, which had replaced wheat grain. The birds met this challenge by placing their corn kernels on a railway and waiting for a small “shifting engine” to crush them. The Girard Point employee who witnessed this behavior was amazed by the way sparrows were able to solve the corn problem. “Don’t tell me a sparrow hasn’t any brains,” he declared, labeling the sparrow “a knowing bird” which could “figure out a thing for himself in a way that is astonishing.” ⁴⁵ A similar behavior was reported over a decade later by Matt Booth, a railway engineer in Columbus, Ohio. In 1914, Booth claimed that he had frequently seen “sparrows place corn on the rails before his engine so that it might be crushed and more easily eaten.” ⁴⁶

One critique leveled at sparrows across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that they were hostile to other birds, particularly the native species of the United States. Yet this perceived aggression did give rise to some behaviors that were labeled as intelligent. In 1903, a “bird photographer” was quoted as witnessing an altercation between a sparrow and a swallow, when the former tried to steal a feather from the nest of the latter. The swallow fought off the intruder. About an hour later, however, the sparrow returned with “about a hundred companions.” This avian army killed the swallow and destroyed its nest. “Sparrows are intelligent,” concluded the bird photographer. ⁴⁷ Sparrows were also adept at avoiding predators. “In its centuries of experience as a parasite upon man,” declared a New York newspaper in 1889, “the sparrow has developed extraordinary intelligence in avoiding the attacks of other animals.” ⁴⁸ The behavior of urban sparrows also appeared to shift in response to human persecution. Robert Wilson Shufeldt Jr., an osteologist and vocal white supremacist, claimed in 1920 that sparrows in Washington had given up building large, communal nests in public spaces in favor of secrecy. Whenever he tried to observe a sparrow carrying nesting material, “the bird would drop what it had; in an unconcerned manner take up something else, or fly up into a tree until I took my departure.” Shufeldt attributed his inability to spot a single sparrow nest in Washington that year to this avian cunning. ⁴⁹

Over the closing decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, newspapers and periodicals described sparrows as engineers or architects in possession of intelligence, skill, and industry. It is unlikely that these claims, by anonymous observers, railway engineers, silo workers, photographers, and journalists, would have been accepted at face value by professional ornithologists or psychologists. Yet it was accepted that sparrows were well adapted, perhaps even uniquely so, for city living. The sparrow, wrote the editor of the American Field magazine in 1888, “is a metropolitan by birth, education, and desire.” ⁵⁰ Similarly, James P. Porter, the animal psychologist, accepted that the true qualities of the sparrow only emerged in urban environments while maintaining a level of skepticism about what this meant for questions of animal intelligence versus instinct. These ambiguities raise the question of what Americans were seeing when they recorded signs of sparrow intelligence. Were they witnessing genuine signs of animal intelligence at work? Or were they really marveling at the semi-domesticated state of the sparrow and its ability to integrate into human lives and technology? One way of answering this question is to examine perceptions of sparrows who failed to integrate into the urban environment.

Urban incompatibility and ingenious sparrows

The integration of the sparrow into urban environments did not always go smoothly. In the United States, there was little incentive to appreciate novel sparrow behavior in government reports when the birds had been labeled as foreign invaders that threatened the country. ⁵¹ Clinton Hart Merriam, zoologist and head of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy at the United States Department of Agriculture, stated in 1887 that sparrows had exerted “a very appreciable influence on architecture.” This influence consisted of a series of “modifications” to the cornices, gables, roofs, and embellishments of buildings, due to the “disfigurement of buildings by the nests and excrement of the Sparrows.” ⁵² Other government biologists made the same complaints. Ned Dearborn, an ornithologist also employed by the Department of Agriculture, described in 1912 how the “filthy” sparrow “defiles buildings and ornamental trees, shrubs, and vines with its excrement and with its bulky nests.” ⁵³ His colleague, Walter B. Barrows, complained that the sparrow gathered “in immense flocks to roost and often selects cornices, windowcaps, ornamental work about the eaves and gables of buildings,” where it defaced buildings with its excrement. The birds also dropped nesting material into gutters and spouts, so that “the water of cisterns is defiled, or overflow of pipes results, sometimes causing great damage.” ⁵⁴

The realization that sparrows sometimes failed to fit neatly into the urban landscape extended beyond professional ornithology. In 1898, a packing firm in Kansas City, Missouri, began to experience problems with its electric lights. A satirical account of the firm’s woes, printed in the Washington Post, depicted its irritated superintendent interrogating an electrician about the source of the problem. The electrician blamed sparrows. “The confounded birds,” they claimed, “take the safety strips between the binding posts for threads and try to grab them off for their nests.” When the sparrows grabbed these lead wires, they received a fatal electric shock and shut off the lights at the Kansas City packing company. Eventually, the wires were covered in mica (a mineral that acts as an electrical insulator) to prevent the sparrows from causing more outages. ⁵⁵ The Kansas City incident shows that no praise (and little sympathy) was extended for sparrows that chose the wrong nesting materials: behaviors that led to their own demise or inconvenienced their human counterparts. When sparrows adapted to life in and among electrical infrastructure, they were soon accepted as part of urban life. In Kansas City, as in Pittsburgh, sparrows took advantage of the electric arc lights on the city streets. Sparrows built their nests inside by harnessing a crossbar within the metal cones covering the lights. The birds did this so frequently that the Kansas City “lampman” in charge of maintaining the streetlights eventually gave up on removing the nests and left them in place. ⁵⁶

The failure of sparrows to meet the challenges of urban living could have more serious consequences. In the town of Three Oaks, Michigan, a typhoid epidemic erupted among its thousand or so inhabitants in 1893. The cause of the sudden epidemic was a mystery until a member of the board of health investigated the town’s waterworks standpipe. By the late nineteenth century, these tall, cylindrical, water-filled structures were a familiar sight. They were designed to maintain a continuous downward pressure on water systems to facilitate the flow of water into homes and businesses. When the health inspector climbed to the top of the Three Oaks standpipe, it was discovered that the cover built for the top of the standpipe had never been installed. Inside the structure was a grisly sight: the bodies of young sparrows, numbering in the thousands, covering the surface of the water. A ledge running around the interior of the standpipe had seemingly offered sparrows a safe and sheltered site on which to build their nests. However, the water-filled standpipe had claimed the lives of many young birds who had attempted to fly. Following this discovery, the standpipe was immediately emptied, cleaned, and repainted. ⁵⁷ In Three Oaks, sparrows had taken advantage of human error to access a restricted space. Yet their innovative choice of nesting site could not be applauded by human observers when over twenty of Three Oaks’ inhabitants had been struck down by typhoid. ⁵⁸

For birds, even those like sparrows with a metropolitan reputation, urban environments were full of challenges and hazards. American urbanites did not only see sparrows avoiding these hazards or falling victim to them, but also witnessed the birds extracting themselves or each other from peril. In 1883, in the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a young sparrow was seen falling into a pail of water. Several sparrows flew to its assistance, extracting the youngster by dropping “sticks, stones, and other particles that would float” into the bucket until a “completed life-raft” on which the drowning sparrow could stand was formed. ⁵⁹ Later instances of such rescues were held up as evidence of bird intelligence. In 1897, a group of “intelligent sparrows” in Nashville came to the rescue of one of their number who had become trapped beneath an overturned box. “The English sparrow,” claimed an observer, “is perhaps the shrewdest bird going.” The birds quickly harnessed their “ingenuity” by digging a tunnel under the box. ⁶⁰ In 1907, another anonymous eyewitness, this time from Chicago, described an event “that shows how close instinct sometimes comes to reason in birds.” A sparrow had become trapped in a sticky paste that had dripped onto the sidewalk from a poster. A score of sparrows reportedly came to assist by carrying water from a nearby fountain on their feathers. They then scattered this water onto their trapped companion, dissolving the paste. Eventually the trapped sparrow was able to extract itself and make its way to the fountain for a bath. ⁶¹ For journalists and editors interpreting this report, it was not clear where avian instinct, reason, and intelligence began or ended.

Even academic biologists struggled to determine whether the ability of birds to extract themselves from danger was a sign of intelligence or instinct. Among their number was Francis Hobart Herrick, who received his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1888 before moving to Western Reserve University as an instructor in biology. In 1891, he was promoted to Professor of Biology, working with the United States Fish Commission on the decline of lobsters. ⁶² His 1901 book, The Home Life of Wild Birds, praised by contemporaries for the quality of its photographs, contained Herrick’s theories on avian intelligence. He was wary of anthropomorphizing birds, arguing that “The constant reading of human attributes into the activities of animals is to begin at the wrong end, and is a drag on accurate knowledge” and that one must “tak[e] care not to press analogies further than the observed facts will warrant.” This cautious approach, however, did not imply that animals lacked intelligence or the ability to reason. Herrick instead sought to distinguish between animal instinct (“unlearned or inherited powers”) and habit (“learned or acquired abilities that are the result of experience”). Mating, nest building, and its “architecture” were examples of instinct, whereas young birds learning which foods to eat and how to avoid predators were examples of habit. “The power of forming habits,” continued Herrick, “is a sign of intelligence, but not necessarily of reason. The intelligence may be a small grain and never destined to grow into a flourishing tree of knowledge, but it must exist along with the power of profiting by experience.” ⁶³

Herrick’s taxonomy of mental ability was complex, attempting to distinguish instinct, habit, intelligence, reason, and knowledge. Sparrows ranked quite highly on Herrick’s scale of animal minds. He considered caution to be a learned habit and thus a sign of rudimentary intelligence. Sparrows possessed wariness of humans in abundance. Herrick described leaving corn outside his window, which hungry sparrows were initially afraid to approach. It was possible, he claimed, to train birds to return to the same place and eventually to take food from the hand. For sparrows, though, “life in a populous town is usually too complicated to admit of carrying out the experiment with success in any reasonable time.” ⁶⁴ In 1908, Herrick was quoted in the Democratic Advocate newspaper in an article on the ability of wild birds to cope with novel emergencies. Although entanglement or choking on threads or lines was a common hazard for birds, different species had drastically different responses to such emergencies. Sparrows would intervene rapidly to “pluck a horse hair from the mouth of a nesting [bird],” while an oriole would watch helplessly if its mate became entangled in line. Robins did not seem to understand the mechanics of string or line, failing to secure their nests in the way that urban sparrows did when building hanging nests in awnings. Herrick, however, appeared to be most impressed by seagulls, which dropped shellfish to crack them open. “This suggests intelligence or even analogical reasoning,” he claimed, “but probably does not rise above the associative memory.” ⁶⁵ In other words, birds could learn to associate actions and objects (like the dropping of a shell and its cracking open) through experience but did not possess higher reasoning.

Humanmade traps presented another danger to sparrows. Following their mid-nineteenth-century introduction, the birds had increasingly been presented as an economic and ecological menace. In addition to damaging buildings, sparrows were accused of consuming farmers’ crops and driving out indigenous American birds from urban spaces. The ornithologist Ned Dearborn used a 1912 government-printed bulletin to recommend that traps be laid for sparrows in urban spaces. His rationale was that legal restrictions and “public sentiment” made the use of guns and poison to control sparrows unfeasible in towns and cities. Indigenous American birds, which were frequently spotted in “suburban localities,” could also be safely released from traps. To entice sparrows into traps, it was necessary to closely observe their behavior and even attempt to see the world from a sparrow’s perspective. Dearborn, for example, suggested that humans harness the natural curiosity of sparrows to their advantage by adding feathers or hay to their traps to “excite the interest of sparrows and hasten their entrance.” ⁶⁶ It was also important not to let any sparrows escape, as they would “spread the fear of traps, and before long very few of the birds can be induced to go into one.” ⁶⁷ Traps did not seem to be particularly effective. In 1915, Niel Morrow Ladd, a member of the Greenwich Bird Protective Society, complained that campaigns to eradicate the sparrow had amounted to nothing, in part because the birds were so “wary of traps.” ⁶⁸ Explaining how to coax sparrows into traps, or explaining why the birds were not fooled into entering, involved assigning agency and emotion to sparrows.

The mixed reception of sparrows in American towns and cities provides some insights into how avian minds were understood and valued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Urban environments forced sparrows into novel encounters with new infrastructures and technologies. Sometimes, these encounters resulted in behaviors that were labeled as intelligent, as sparrows stopped town clocks, settled under arc lights, or constructed complex nests in shop awnings. On other occasions, sparrows found themselves in trouble, falling into buckets of water or becoming stuck in poster paste. In these circumstances, sparrows sometimes rescued one another. These rescues were described as instances of shrewdness, ingenuity, or intelligence in letters to newspapers. Novel sparrow behavior was not praised, however, when it led to profound inconvenience or even danger to humans. Avian inquisitiveness and exploration was not welcomed when it meant sparrows entering water supplies or interrupting electrical systems. With this distinction in mind, were reports of sparrow intelligence in the town and city really gauging the mental abilities of sparrows? Or were they assessing the ability of birds to live in urban spaces without disrupting the lives of their human inhabitants?

Conclusion: Technology and domestication

In the laboratory of James P. Porter at Indiana University, sparrows were performing well in simple mazes and memory tests. To explain why his captive sparrows were able to complete these trials, even improvising and adapting to unforeseen problems in them, Porter turned to the writings of Charles Otis Whitman, the leading American expert on animal behavior. Like many biologists who engaged with animal minds at the dawn of the twentieth century, Whitman drew a distinction between animal instinct and intelligence. During his work with pigeons, Whitman had found the behavior of domesticated dovecote pigeons to be more flexible and adaptative than that of their wild cousins. He explained this difference by arguing that domestication lessened the impact of natural selection, thus reducing the need for birds to rely on instinct to make life-or-death decisions. With instinct out of the way, new opportunities arose for avian minds to exercise freedom of choice and action. In Porter’s interpretation, Whitman believed that “Domestication and semi-domestication” accounted for “differences in intelligence and variability of instinct” between birds. If the dovecote pigeon had acted more intelligently thanks to domestication, then the same could be said of sparrows, which had “been for thousands of years in just as favorable, indeed, if not more favorable, conditions with relation to domestication.” ⁶⁹

Although the newspaper reports and journal articles described in this paper did not have a clear definition of what sparrow intelligence was or how it came about, their accounts of sparrow behavior were almost always describing a kind of “domestication.” From an animal perspective, there is no fundamental difference between natural habitats and technological artefacts. Scholars have demonstrated how many nonhuman animals have made their homes in urban environments, within or surrounded by the technology and infrastructure of the modern city. ⁷⁰ This domestication matters for our understanding of historical and contemporary perspectives on animal minds, as our knowledge of other living things – and our valuation of them – is often mediated through technology. ⁷¹ A contemporary example is the use of digital surveillance technologies in natural history. While such technology has the ability to entertain and introduce animals to new audiences, some livestreams overemphasize the “anthropomorphic antics” and “cuteness” of animals to appeal to audiences. ⁷² As this paper has shown, the technology and infrastructure of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American city similarly mediated people’s knowledge of the house sparrow and even how much value they assigned to them.

What were residents of these American cities really seeing as they watched sparrows interact with arc lights, shop awnings, standpipes, and architecture? The highest praise for sparrows’ mental ability came when the birds were able to successfully navigate the challenges of urban living in a way that did not unduly inconvenience the human inhabitants of towns and cities. When newspapers and journals praised the intelligence of sparrows, they were often praising their domestic qualities. On one level, contemporary reactions to urban sparrows and speculation on their mental abilities were the result of conflating domesticity with intelligence. Yet other factors may also have been at work. The nineteenth century saw what environmental historian Ted Steinberg termed the “death of the organic city” in the United States, as a series of reforms banished working animals from the city and attempted to control pests, ushering in an era of newfound control of urban animals. ⁷³ The introduced sparrow, however, thwarted this control. It incorporated itself into the infrastructure and architecture of town and city, defying all attempts to remove it. Faced with this involuntary cohabitation, what could urban Americans do? One conceptual strategy to cope with this new reality was to praise animals that made the smart choice of acting domesticated, thereby accepting their place as part of the human city, rather than seizing the urban environment and its technologies from its human inhabitants. It was either embrace the sparrow as an intelligent – but safely domesticated – novelty or, in the words of Minnesota ornithologist Dietrich Lange, accept that the United States had been conquered by an “unequivocal imperialist.” ⁷⁴