Passer (genus)

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Passer
Red sparrow, male

Red sparrow , male

Systematics
Order : Passerines (Passeriformes)
Subordination : Songbirds (passeri)
without rank: Passerida
Superfamily : Passeroidea
Family : Sparrows (Passeridae)
Genre : Passer
Scientific name
Passer
Brisson , 1760

Passer (Latin for sparrow) is a genus of birds withinthe sparrow family . Its distribution area is predominantly Eurasia and Africa, representatives of the genus have also been introduced on other continents. The number of species of the genus is small in relation to the size of the distribution area. Most species, however, are very common birds in their respective range. The house sparrow is one of the most widespread species.

Appearance

Passer species are small, brownish to greyish feathered birds with often black, yellow or white color markings. The vast majority of the species show a pronounced sexual dimorphism . In most species, the males have black throats. The throat coloration can extend to the front chest. Typically, the top of the head of the males is at least partially red-brown, the cheeks are whitish or pale brown. The females are usually much less conspicuous and mostly brownish to brownish-gray in color. The body length of the birds is between 10 and 25 centimeters. The tail and beak are short. The beak is usually conical in shape. They are usually gregarious birds that form large flocks. The best known species in Central Europe include the field sparrow and the house sparrow. Some species have singing that is pleasant to humans.

Two damara sparrows

distribution

Most species of the genus Passer occur in open terrain in the warmer climates of Africa and Eurasia . In the regions in which the range of different species of Passer overlap, the respective species inhabit different ecological niches. A total of 25 species occur in Africa and Eurasia, 19 of them live in Africa and 13 are restricted in their distribution to this continent. Some species such as the Swahili sparrow have a relatively small distribution area. The range of the gray-headed sparrow, on the other hand, extends south of the Sahara across the entire African continent. The Socotra Sparrow, on the other hand, only occurs on a few islands off the Horn of Africa.

According to the latest findings, the first Passer species emerged in Africa. The Cape Sparrow is considered to be the oldest recent species. Most species are cultivated and breed and live in close proximity to humans. This has helped them to spread from the area of ​​origin over parts of Africa and Eurasia. Apart from this natural spread, Passer species have also been introduced in North and South America and Australia .

Way of life

House Sparrow , male

With the exception of the rust sparrow , Passer species are sociable birds that spend most of their lives in small flocks and breed in loose colonies. For the brown-backed gold sparrow , breeding colonies have been identified that comprised more than 50,000 pairs. The willow sparrow has already found 200 nests of this type in a single tree.

The Passer species only build a loose nest. Depending on the species and the nesting opportunity, this can be in a shrub or tree. They also use hollows in trees and buildings and breed, for example, in the nests of the white stork . In the case of the very local house sparrow, some individuals use the same nesting site their entire life. The clutch consists of up to eight eggs, which are typically incubated by both parent birds for twelve to 14 days. The young birds usually fledge after 14 to 24 days. Passer species typically raise several broods per year. This is one reason why they were able to colonize areas into which they had previously been introduced very quickly.

Some of the Passer species also produce hybrids in the wild. Hybrids come, for example, between the gray-headed sparrow , which is widespread in Africa, and the parrot-beaked sparrow ; the gray-headed sparrow and the Swahili sparrow as well as the gray-headed sparrow and passer diffuse . Such hybrids usually only occur in small overlapping zones. Hybrids between the gray-headed sparrow and the parrot-billed sparrow have been observed in a smaller region in Ethiopia and a somewhat larger area in Kenya.

Passer species mainly look for food on the ground and mostly eat seeds. Insects play a bigger role in their diet, especially during the breeding season. However, they are fundamentally food opportunists and eat invertebrates at any time if they are available in sufficient numbers.

Passer species and human

It has been proven that 16 species from the genus Passer settle on or in human buildings. Two species have particularly attached themselves to humans. These are the house sparrow and the tree sparrow . The house sparrow developed around 10,000 years ago in the area of ​​the Fertile Crescent . The tree sparrow is originally an Asiatic species, which developed in the river valley of the Yellow River and spread as a cultural follower of humans in large parts of Eurasia.

Literature and keeping as an ornamental bird

House sparrows copulating

The Passer species are not ornamental birds in the strict sense of the word , but the chestnut sparrow and the brown-backed gold sparrow , which differ from other Passer species in their colorful plumage, have occasionally been introduced for ornamental bird keeping in recent decades.

In the literature there are numerous indications that the less colorful Passer representatives were occasionally raised by humans and thus became pets. Clodia owned one such bird, which her lover Catullus mentions in one of the erotic poems he wrote in her honor. His mourning poem when this bird died has also come down to us. John Skelton proved his satirical talent in 1505 with Phyllyp Sparrowe , in which he made a young lady mourn in courtly style over the loss of her little sparrow. The 1,400 line long poem, influenced by Catullus, lets the protagonist Jane Scroop, a Benedictine from Norfolk, use all her literary erudition for her mourning for the bird; Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate are used, and the text indulges in a variety of digressions. The English poet John Clare (* 1793, † 1864) himself kept a sparrow as a domestic bird from the genus Passer and describes in his diary how he stopped his cat from hunting the bird.

Passer species entered the literature because of their alleged excessive sex drive, which Aristotle already assumed they were. Geoffrey Chaucer called the sparrow a son of Venus and describes one of the characters in his Canterbury Tales as "lascivious as a sparrow".

Passer species as food

Passer species were and are regularly eaten by humans. In Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème , for example, a trader in front of the Café Mormus offers sparrows. So-called sparrow pots have been documented since the early 16th century . These are unglazed ceramic pots with a narrow neck and a missing base. They are hung with the floor opening facing the house wall and offer the Passer species suitable nesting opportunities . Due to the manufacturing method, the young birds can be removed by humans just before they fledge. These sparrow pots were probably developed in Delft, which, as the center of the Dutch beer brewery, had a corresponding grain trade and thus a large Passer population. The use of sparrow pots became uncommon in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. Alternative explanations for the use of sparrow pots, which have been proven in large numbers for London in particular, are the supply of birds of prey with food or the attempt to prevent the sparrows from settling in the thatched roofs. The nesting activities could damage such roofs. A use of sparrow pots is also documented from Malta . There are also comparable sparrow pots in Southeast Asia. In Sri Lanka they are hung up because it is considered a sign of luck when sparrows breed on the house.

Members of the genus Passer are still eaten in a number of countries. In November 1993, for example, Dutch customs confiscated two million frozen tree sparrows that came from China and were to be shipped to Italy via Rotterdam.

Passer species as pests

The Passer species can cause some damage on agricultural land. They not only eat the maturing grain, but occasionally also break the stalks. Since they prefer to forage near hedges, it is often the edge of a field that is particularly badly damaged. In some countries, such as Great Britain, premiums were therefore still paid for killed Passer representatives in the 19th century . The willow sparrows , which are actually not very common in Europe, have become a problem in some regions. In Tunisia, the destruction of willow sparrow nests has been prescribed since 1892, but this is relatively little actually practiced. Whether this regulation has any major effects on the population has not yet been conclusively investigated. In the Estremadura , where rice is grown after the implementation of irrigation projects, willow sparrows are considered to be serious pests. Willow sparrows are breeding birds of the summer-dry steppe and desert regions. They use the short vegetation phase after rainfall to raise their brood. After successfully rearing a clutch, they move further north to find suitable breeding areas there. By the time they have reached the northern limit of their range, their population may therefore have risen sharply. For Kazakhstan, the number of birds found in one square kilometer has been estimated at up to 2.5 million individuals. Such large population numbers make effective measures against damage to grain fields almost impossible. The cultivation of wheat is therefore hardly economically feasible in these regions. Mid-1950s began Cape Sparrow colonizing the wine-growing areas in the southwest of South Africa's Cape Province. There it first fed on seeds, but then increasingly began to eat grapes and cause considerable damage there. They also fall on fruit-growing areas and eat buds there. They particularly prefer that of pears.

One of the most serious bird persecutions occurred during the Great Leap Forward in China in 1958 . Mao Zedong had come to believe that a single tree sparrow would consume around 4.5 kilograms of grain per year. One of the mass campaigns of 1958, the eradication of the four plagues , was directed not only against mosquitoes, flies and rats, but also against birds and, among them, the tree sparrow in particular. It was not taken into account that birds like the tree sparrow also eat invertebrates, which are grain pests. In 1960, birds were replaced with bed bugs in the campaign to eradicate the four plagues. Only after Mao Zedong's death was it officially admitted through the Chinese news agency Xinhua that the senseless killing of the birds had caused ecological damage and that efforts were now being made to increase the sparrow populations again.

Passer species as carriers of disease

Passer species are considered to be carriers of bacteria ( e.g. Salmonella ) or also as reservoir hosts for the spread of various arboviruses . The house sparrow is assumed to play a key role in the spread of a representative of this group of viruses, the St. Louis encephalitis virus in North America. The house sparrow is also associated with the West Nile virus . The characteristics of the spread of this virus in the USA have made the house sparrow suspect, alongside corvids and various migratory birds, of playing a decisive role in the spread.

It has been shown in the laboratory that sparrows can be infected with the particularly virulent form of the A / H5N1 influenza virus if they react only weakly to it. Outside the laboratory, sparrows infected with massive A / H5N1 infested poultry holdings have so far only been discovered in East Asia.

species

The following species belong to the genus Passer (sorted by scientific name):

Web links

Commons : Passer  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

supporting documents

literature

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Fry et al., P. 1
  2. ↑ Peter Clement, Alan Harris, John Davis: Finches and Sparrows - An Identification Guide . Christopher Helm, London 1993, ISBN 0-7136-8017-2 , p. 442.
  3. ↑ Fry et al., P. 2 and p. 17
  4. ↑ Luise M. Allende, Isabel Rubio, Valentin Ruiz del Valle, Jesus Guillén, Jorge Martínez-Laso, Ernesto Lowy, Pilar Varela, Jorge Zamora and others. a .: The Old World Sparrows (Genus Passer ) Phylogeography and their Relative Abundance of Nuclear mtDNA Pseudogenes . In: Journal of Molecular Evolution . 53, 2001, pp. 144-154. doi : 10.1007 / s002390010202 .
  5. ↑ JD Summers-Smith: Pinowski, J .; and Summers-Smith, JD (Ed.): Changes in distribution and habitat utilization by members of the genus Passer  (= Granivorous birds in the agricultural landscape). Pánstwowe Wydawnictom Naukowe, Warszawa 1990, ISBN 83-01-08460-X , pp. 11-29.
  6. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 19
  7. ^ Summers-Smith, p. 20
  8. ↑ Kathleen Groschupf: Elphick, Chris; Dunning, Jr., John B .; Sibley, David (Ed.): Old World Sparrows  (= The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior). Christopher Helm, London 2001, ISBN 0-7136-6250-6 , pp. 562-564.
  9. ^ Summers-Smith, p. 20
  10. ↑ Fry et al., P. 2
  11. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 19
  12. ↑ Summer-Smith (2005), p. 18
  13. ↑ Summers-Smith, p. 29 and p. 30
  14. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 47
  15. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 50
  16. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 50
  17. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 52
  18. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 51 and p. 52
  19. ↑ Fry et al., P. 29
  20. ^ Summers-Smith, pp. 60 and 61
  21. ↑ Fry et al., P. 18
  22. ^ Judith Shapiro: Mao's war against nature - Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 0-521-78680-0 , pp. 86-90
  23. ↑ Summers-Smith (2005), p. 57
  24. ↑ Ted. R. Anderson: Biology of the ubiquitous house sparrow. From genes to populations. Page 427ff
  25. ↑ JH Rappole, Z. Hubálek: Migratory birds and West Nile virus. In: Journal of Applied Microbiology. 94, 2003, p. 47, doi : 10.1046 / j.1365-2672.94.s1.6.x .
  26. ↑ LEL Perkins, DE Swayne: Varied Pathogenicity of a Hong Kong-origin H5N1 Avian Influenza Virus in Four Passerine Species and Budgerigars. ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 2003 (PDF; 975 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.vetpathology.org