House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) - The Globetrotter

"Wróbel zwyczajny - Passer domesticus - samiec", a house sparrow in Poland, taken by Alina Zienowicz. Retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.

Modified from the original posted on the Archosaurophilia Tumblr on November 21, 2014.

The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) is a ubiquitous passerid Old World sparrow, native to Eurasia and North Africa, but also found in introduced populations across three other continents, including the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Australasia. It owes its phenomenal success in part to its ability to adapt to areas of human habitation in wildly varying habitats and climate zones. The house sparrow was among the first species granted a binomial name by Carl Linnaeus, owing to its ubiquity in the European gardens which that scholar so often saw, and it is consequently sometimes treated as the archetypical bird (and perhaps, by extension, the archetypical dinosaur).

House sparrows will feed happily on seeds and grains from plants such as corn or wheat, as well as wild grasses and feed left out by humans. They will also hunt insects on occasion. They can be seen hopping around in gardens, on trees, or on rooftops in inhabited areas, almost never occurring in the wilderness in their introduced range. They commonly congregate in flocks in which males keep a firm hierarchy over the female birds through the winter and fall months, but it is more poorly crystallized in the spring and summer when the females seem to be more assertive. They are naked and helpless upon hatching from a clutch of anywhere between one and eight eggs, and will live for as much as almost sixteen years.

Due to their cosmopolitan distribution and adaptability, the House sparrow is ranked as a Least Concern species by the IUCN, though sub-populations in certain areas, such as the Indian subcontinent, are threatened.