For most of my life, I had just assumed that every little brown bird was the same kind of bird.
Even when they were in my direct line of sight, my brain barely registered that they were even there. No one else seemed to really notice them either. They didn't have a baseball team named after them like a cardinal. They weren't draped in the American flag on the back of some scary dude's pickup truck like a bald eagle. They were just those boring, stupid brown trash birds that sometimes got a little too close on restaurant patios while I tried to get drunk and eat French fries.
But then over the past few years I got waaaaaay into birding (normies refer to it as birdwatching) and learned that one of these brown birds, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, wasn't actually that boring at all.
It was still the color of dirt so, yes, unspectacular in that regard, but interesting in that it could only be found in one major city on the entire continent of North America, and that city happened to be St. Louis, Missouri.
I had made this discovery at a time when I became so passionate about birding that friends and family began to worry that my brain was cracked.
"What's with the binoculars?" was a question asked in hushed tones more than once during the two-year span that I was frequently seen in public with a pair around my neck. I had been so consumed by the newfound thrill of identifying a previously unseen bird that I was bringing them with me everywhere, even if I was just going to the grocery store, just in case I saw something flapping around in the parking lot.
The origin of my new hobby was not a complete mental breakdown, but the preference to avoid one. My first son had just been born and the sudden increase of my life's responsibilities from few to many, combined with a total lack of sleep, was having a major impact on my psyche. At the same time, a global pandemic was really hitting its stride, shattering every delusion I used to have about any control I had over the universe.
And my near-constant phone use was exacerbating the problem. I spent several hours a day doom-scrolling, obsessively checking the news for COVID-19 updates, and sometimes calling my relatives racist on Facebook. Even when I was outside, going for a run around Francis Park, I still somehow found a way to look at my phone, often playing Pokémon GO, a game where you wander around your neighborhood trying to catch shiny Bulbasaurs. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm jealous.
I started to become vaguely aware that I was losing touch with the real world around me, which wasn't necessarily an uncommon occurrence, but this time I had a baby to look after, and getting trapped in my own head was no longer a luxury I could afford. I needed to find a relaxing way to reconnect with my immediate surroundings.
I landed on birding pretty quickly. Sort of like Pokémon GO, birding was a kind of game in itself, where your high score increased every time you found a new species, and also a puzzle in trying to figure out which species you were even looking at, a task that can be fairly complicated when so many of them closely resemble each other. I also had an inherent vague interest in birds ever since Jurassic Park told me they were basically flying dinosaurs. So I got the Peterson Field Guide to Birds, stopped looking for holiday-themed Pikachus on my phone and started looking for creatures in the real world instead.
My initial objectives were only to identify the flashier, more colorful birds I had never previously known by name, birds that weren't burned into the public consciousness like robins and blue jays. I also wanted to find birds I had never seen or heard of before due to not paying attention or caring.
I set up a couple of bird feeders in my Southampton backyard and had some early fancy-named successes. There was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. A couple of Indigo Buntings. Even a White-Tailed Treebeak made a single appearance. And yes, I did make that last bird up.
Due to the limitations of my urban landscape, birds like that grosbeak were about as rare as a face covering in a Bass Pro Shop. Most of the time the feeder was occupied by squirrels or those lame brown birds I mentioned earlier. My initial attempts to even identify those stupid birds were discouraging because they all looked exactly the same. But I reached a point where they were all I had left, and the endorphin rush that was greeting each new identification was starting to become addicting, so I did what every junkie does and made do with what I had.
The first dirt bird I successfully identified was a House Sparrow. This really is the brown bird that you see everywhere. I consulted with my field guide to check its North American range, and the entire map was purple, indicating this bird was at all places at all times, no matter the season.
It turned out to be the most prevalent bird in the world, too, an invasive species from the Middle East that has bullied its way into nearly every continent, running native species out of their homes and nesting in every nook and cranny it can fit into. If we ever colonize the moon or Mars, it'll find a way to get there, too.
The second brown bird I identified ended up being exponentially more fascinating: the Eurasian Tree Sparrow. I checked my North American field guide assuming I'd found another wide-ranging pest, but it turned out to be something drastically different. Instead of an all-purple map, it was a tiny purple smudge, hovering right over where I lived.
I had learned enough to know that this extremely confined range was bizarre, or even possibly incorrect. Birds are typically spread out over several states, if not countries, so for one to be isolated in a small geographic area that wasn't an island was a bit unbelievable.
I checked other sources, which all delivered the same result: In all of North America, the only major city that this bird could be found was the one I happened to be living in: St. Louis.
I was pretty gobsmacked. At least, as gobsmacked as one can be over a fucking bird. How did St. Louis have its own? I needed answers, and after all my previous effort to find a hobby that kept me offline, I was right back on the internet, but this time with a purpose.
The Eurasian Tree Sparrow's St. Louis story started in the 1830s when, as is a recurring theme in history, shit was going down in Germany. The country was engulfed in economic and political turmoil, and one of the more popular solutions to the ongoing problems was just to get the hell out of there. A German by the name of Dr. Gottfried Duden came to the St. Louis area and figured it was the best option for relocation, and enthusiastically argued as much in a very popular book at the time, spurring thousands of other fellow countrymen to follow his lead.
It should be noted that, as Ernst A. Stadler wrote in The German Settlement of St. Louis, a lot of those Germans were pretty pissed off when they got here and discovered that the winters and summers were pretty fucking miserable. Duden himself left after a couple of years and never came back.
Anyway, the German population here began to thrive. So much so that a few decades later there were multiple (!) German language newspapers. One of their owners, Carl Daenzer of Anzeiger Des Westens, decided St. Louis had not been quite Germanized enough, so a decision was made to introduce a variety of invasive avian species into the local ecosystem, just so the German transplants here could see and hear the same birds that they had back in the country they had just escaped from.
On April 25, 1870, roughly 20 Eurasian Tree Sparrows were ceremoniously released in Lafayette Park. There were some other German species that were released that day as well, but they all died.
Only the Eurasian Tree Sparrow had the courage to live in Missouri. With a little bit of luck, and probably some inbreeding, their population and territory began to flourish in the area, much like their human counterparts (minus the inbreeding, one assumes). But after a few years those territorial gains came to a near standstill after a bigger, dumber invasive species started to muscle its way into the area.
"Some story goes that someone wanted to introduce to North America all the birds that Shakespeare ever mentioned in his plays," says Vincent St. Louis. The biology professor at the University of Alberta studied the Eurasian Tree Sparrow as part of his master thesis and not because (as he assured me) his last name was St. Louis.
One of those Shakespearean birds was the House Sparrow, the first brown bird I successfully identified on my feeder, which was released in New York in the 1850s. It only took a few decades for the House Sparrow to spread across the entire country, overlapping the St. Louis Sparrow (trademark!) in range, making it almost certainly the reason why that tiny purple smudge over the Mississippi hasn't grown much over the past century.
Yet it is growing, says Bill Rowe, president of the St. Louis Audubon Society, and another expert I spoke to about this topic because I'm a very scholarly and rigorous writer.
"They haven't been static for 150 years; they have expanded slowly," Rowe says. "It's just been in the past 30-plus years that they have been breeding in Iowa."
On the other side of the planet, it's a completely different story. The Eurasian Tree Sparrow is widespread over both the continents in its name, and it is crucial to the ecosystem. They are so crucial, in fact, that an attempt to exterminate them in China in the 1950s played a major role in bringing about the deadliest famine in all of human history. At the time, the Chinese government identified the bird as a pest that ate substantial amounts of the country's grain supply, but what was overlooked was the substantial amounts of crop-eating bugs they also consumed. The lack of sparrows to keep that bug population in check contributed to a disastrous agricultural upheaval, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
In stark contrast, if the Eurasian Tree Sparrow were run out of America, the worst thing that might happen is that the wild bird seed at Varietees Bird Store would have to be restocked slightly less often. Their range is so limited and inconsequential that most people in the country, even those who live in St. Louis, aren't even aware that they exist, like expiration dates on temp tags. It's not entirely known how the bird managed to stick around to begin with, but the leading theory is that it has something to do with their size.
Both St. Louis (the biologist) and Rowe emphasized that the Eurasian Tree Sparrow is a bit smaller than the more aggressive House Sparrow. Both species can make homes out of every possible little hole and crevice available, but the Eurasian Tree Sparrow can shack up in slightly tinier, even more impossible places that the House Sparrow cannot, like, say, a crack in my house fascia that I didn't know existed, preventing the House Sparrow from running them out of every available nesting site.
As far as anyone knows, no additional Eurasian Tree Sparrows have been released in North America since 1870. Vincent St. Louis' research supported this theory back in the late 1980s when his genetic studies indicated a fairly shallow gene pool in the local population. That means any Eurasian Tree Sparrow you see in St. Louis is a direct descendant of the original 20 or so birds that were set free in Lafayette Park more than 150 years ago.
So by this point you may be wondering, "How can I go and find this bird for myself, since all the brown birds kind of look the same?" Well, it just so happens this is the easiest of the bunch to spot. Just be warned, it may only take one successful identification before you start down a lifetime of birding, annoyingly choosing vacation spots strictly based on the fauna, and alienating your friends and family by excitedly pointing out a red-shafted Northern Flicker outside of its normal range.
Still here? OK, here goes: If you want to see a Eurasian Tree Sparrow, go to the nearest window and look for the small brown bird with a clear and distinctive black dot on both sides of its face.
Did you see it? Well then congratulations, you're hooked on birding. But if you're going to the grocery store, you can definitely leave your binoculars at home.
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