House sparrows are a rude, quarrelsome, noisy and gregarious lot, but I must confess to a sneaking admiration and fondness for these birds. Like the Norway rat and the house mouse, they have followed Europeans wherever they have settled and made most of the world their domain, often to the detriment of indigenous species. They seem to prefer the company of Homo sapiens and have moved along with us as we have developed, built shelters and cultivated crops, something which their scientific name, Passer domesticus, reveals. Sparrow, their common name, is much the same in every European language, being variations of the old Teutonic sparwa, from sper to quiver. Formerly classed as a finch, that is a seed eater, they are now considered to belong to the weaver family of birds.
Weavers are all gregarious and often live together in trees.
Where the house sparrow builds a bulky rough domed nest, its most highly evolved relatives weave nests of superlative workmanship and produce the most spectacular of all avian architecture. On the outskirts of villages in Africa and southern Asia, a tree bearing up to a hundred weaver finch nests is, I am told, no uncommon sight. Here on the farm, they usually build their nests in the willow trees which leaves them at the risk of storms. There is often so much activity around their large nests that I have often wondered if there is a communal effort in rearing the young, a characteristic of the weaver family of birds. The ornithologist, W.H.Oliver thought that the sparrow's broods could, in favourable conditions, succeed each other so quickly that all but the first laid eggs were partly incubated by the succession of young sparrows.