Part IV: Malthus & the Sparrow

Has the pressures of human population growth left many of America's grass-nesting birds with nowhere to go?

In the short term, the answer is "yes."

In the long term, time will tell.

It's possible that changes in the Conservation Reserve Program will be implemented which will encourage the aggregation of enough large blocks of tall grass prairie that grassland bird populations in the U.S. can at least be stabilized.

A barrier to this, of course, is continued population growth.

Over the course of the next 50 years the population of the United States is expected to grow by 125 million people while the world as a whole is expected to add 3 billion people during this same period of time -- a sum equal to the entire population of the world in 1960.

In the end, in both Europe and the United States, the exponential growth of human population growth may push some native sparrow populations right over the edge.

We can only hope that the sparrow is not a "canary in the coal mine" for the rest of the world's wildlife ... or for the human race.