So rare I never expect, nor recognise them

House sparrows are, to some people, common as dirt. "Feathered rat," I've heard them called.

Not too many decades ago, before I started looking at birds, apparently they were so common that you couldn't really look at a flock of birds in a city and expect the birds to likely be anything but house sparrows. Not so today.

And I almost never see them.

When I do see them, I don't expect them, thus I never recognise them at the time. It takes me getting a few pictures to examine later, and then some searching in my guide books to figure out what they were.

So it was yesterday when, as I walked back and forth, along a short stretch of a brook in another part of town, looking at couple of actual rarities at this time of year (both warblers), I heard five dozen of these beauties singing out their hearts in this winter-dead tree and the evergreen next to it.

Beautiful things, are house sparrows. But I didn't know what they were until I got home.

Poor house sparrows -- they are implicated in a metaphor apparently used long ago in arguing what people now disparage as the "horseshit trickle-down theory" of economics -- using some of the same metaphor.

As it went, if you feed the horses plenty of oats, they will shit out enough undigested protein for the house sparrows to get their fill. Look after the horses and you'll look after the poor street birds. Nice metaphor; poor economics.

In my city, there are fewer horses than a hundred years ago; those that are around still get fed well enough, but they don't even shit where the sparrows are. If you overfeed the modern horses, the city sparrows don't, can't, get any trickle-down benefit.

Trickle-down is poor economics; but "horseshit" is a good metaphor for neo-liberalism.