Weidensperling
The Spanish sparrow is likely to have been established on the western Canary Islands for some time, as it was found on Lanzarote when a naturalist first visited the island in 1828. In the 1830s, it was recorded on Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria and Tenerife and since the 1940s it has reached all the other islands. It reached Madeira in May 1935, when numbers of sparrows were found across the island after nine days of strong, continuous easterly winds. It seems to have reached Cape Verde around the same time it reached the Canaries and it was first recorded there on Santiago by Charles Darwin in 1832. From then onwards it reached all the other larger islands, in a poorly recorded extension of its range.