How Pests Grow
Those who introduced the. rabbit (because it was such excellent ground-game) and the sparrow (because its naggiing note was so home-like) had' little idea what pests these furred and feathered pets would one day be. Mr. James Drummond's Agricultural Department-pam-phlet on" ' Our Feathered Immigrants ' deals with the sparrow's capacity for multiplication in a way that recalls to our minds -the portentous ' chain-prayer-figures that recently appeared in our columns. _Mr. Drummond works out a table' which goes to show that one pair of sparrows will in five years have a living progeny of 322,102, and in ten years of 51,874,849,202. An American calculator makes the figures fo£ the" lastmentioned period (ten years) five - times greater than does Mr. Drummond. But our official naturalist takes Jinto account the death-rate of sparrows * and other' circumstances that keep the increase in^check^' And his more conservative figures are, in all reason, sufficiently portentous.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZT19070425.2.54.2
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New Zealand Tablet, Issue 17, 25 April 1907, Page 22
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151How Pests Grow New Zealand Tablet, Issue 17, 25 April 1907, Page 22
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