On The Cover: Invasive Sparrows and the American Bird Box

abstract: The cover image for this issue of Technology and Culture depicts how bird boxes became contested technologies in the United States. The early twentieth-century image shows a pair of house sparrows ( Passer domesticus )— an introduced species—taking over a bird box intended for native birds. But the claim that sparrows seized bird boxes and other nesting places to the detriment of American birds was controversial. Since their mid-nineteenth-century introduction to the United States, sparrows have had both supporters and detractors who used bird boxes as tools to aid or suppress the birds. This essay argues that this image and others like it constitute a form of “biological propaganda” that supported the professionalization of ornithology in the United States. Natural history illustrations are not value neutral but show animals and technology in such a way as to support their creator’s specific view of nature and what “belongs” in it.