You can find house sparrows (麻雀) in most places where there are houses (or other buildings), and in few places where there aren’t. They have a short history in North America. Here are some facts about house sparrows.

The house sparrow was introduced into Brooklyn, New York, in 1851. By 1900 it had spread to the Rocky Mountains. Two more introductions in the early 1870s, in San Francisco and Salt Lake City, aided the bird’s spread throughout the West. House sparrows are now common across all of North America except Alaska and far northern Canada.

The house sparrow takes frequent dust baths. It throws soil and dust over its body feathers, just as if it were bathing with water. In doing so, a sparrow may make a small depression (凹陷) in the ground, and sometimes defends this spot against other sparrows.

The house sparrow prefers to nest in man­made structures such as lower edges of their roofs or walls of buildings, street lights, and nest boxes instead of in natural nest sites such as holes in trees.

House sparrows are social birds and they have a pecking (啄食) order much the way chickens in a farmyard do. You can find out the standings by paying attention to the black throats of the males. Males with larger patches of black tend to be older and dominant over males with less black. By wearing this information on their feathers, sparrows can avoid some fights and thereby save energy.