A Eurasian tree sparrow has been coming to a feeder in the front yard of a house at 140th and Hoxie in south suburban Burnham. It began showing up regularly in mid-December, but its presence was not made known to the world until after the Calumet-Sand Ridge Christmas Count on New Year’s weekend.
Like its familiar cousin, the Eurasian tree sparrow is an Old World bird whose natural range extends from Western Europe to Hong Kong. And like the house sparrow, the Eurasian tree sparrow was deliberately imported to this country during the late 19th century.
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The bird they knew as the European tree sparrow–the change to the more precise “Eurasian” was made within the last 20 years–did spread in all directions from Saint Louis, but it didn’t spread very far. It can currently be found in a few counties in Missouri and Illinois. Its northernmost residence is Macomb, which is about 150 miles from Saint Louis. Vernon Kleen, an ornithologist with the Illinois Department of Conservation, describes its range in our state as an oval extending from East Saint Louis in the south to Macomb in the north, and from Springfield in the east to Quincy in the west. Jacksonville is the center of abundance.
The case of the Eurasian tree sparrow shows once again how difficult it is to predict the consequences of introducing a new species into an ecosystem. The most common fate of any introduced species is death. The civic-minded sorts who gave us the Eurasian tree sparrow imported more than 200 other species that vanished almost as soon as they arrived.
Introducing game birds has been the national sport of wildlife managers for the last 100 years. Because native species, such as Illinois’ native grouse, the prairie chicken, have been driven out of vast areas by habitat destruction, managers have sought to import shootable birds that can survive in the devastated landscapes of postsettlement America. One of these introductions, the ring-necked pheasant, is well established over a very large range, but many other species show a pattern like that of the Eurasian tree sparrow. If you want to see the black francolin, an Asian partridge, you have to go to one small area in southern Louisiana. If you are looking for a Himalayan snowcock, you have to go to the Ruby Mountains in Nevada. The bird lives nowhere else in North America.
For all we know, the Eurasian tree sparrow may suddenly enter a similar time of prosperity and expansion. Then I won’t have to stand around in the cold in Burnham to see one.
