Welcome guests:

Unwelcome guests:

The welcome mat is out in our yard for goldfinches, swallows and all of our beautiful native songbirds. We wish that there was some way to convince the murderous English sparrows that they are not welcome here.

For several years we have had swallows nesting in a box clearly visible from our bedroom window. This year the swallows started building a nest there again, then we saw that sparrows had taken over. Chris took down the box to clean out the sparrow nest and found the body of the swallow they had killed at the bottom of the nest.

We have now declared open season on English sparrows in our yard and several fathers have brought their boys over for a little target practice. I don’t own a gun and don’t like the idea of killing, but if we do nothing all the birdhouses on our yard will be filled with mother sparrows raising more baby sparrows.

There are also native sparrows: chipping sparrows; song sparrows; grasshopper sparrows and more. They are interesting and inoffensive. It is only these foreigners who have no respect for the native citizens that we consider to be pests.

The title of this post comes from Tennyson and it is an accurate description of nature. There is beauty all around, but there is also savage killing and destruction. “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). Everything changed when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. Even the murderous sparrow is evidence of that

“I marvel at the audacity with which some people presume to speak of God. In giving their evidence to unbelievers, usually their first chapter is to prove the existence of God from the works of nature. . . . But that is not how Scripture speaks, with its better knowledge of the things of God. On the contrary, it speaks of God as a hidden God, and because nature has been corrupted, he has left men to their blindness. They can only escape from this through Jesus Christ, for without him all communication with God is severed.” – Blaise Pascal.