SCIENTISTS BAFFLED

Southland Times, Issue 18809, 30 April 1920, Page 7

SCIENTISTS BAFFLED

WHY DO SPARROWS COMMIT SUICIDE ON BLUE PAPER?

Officials and Fellow.-: of the Zoological Society admit themselves beaten by the query' of a London firm of paper manufacturers (says the Daily Mail). The question (which was in the form of a letter read at their scientific meeting) is. in a nutshell, “Why do sparrows commit suicide in a paper-making machine when a special shade of blue is being converted from pulp into the finished article?” If you see the dawn of a happy expression on the face of an “F.ZjS.,” it means he thinks he has hit on a possible explanation, but it dies out after a minute or two and the mystification is as thick as ever.

The formal letter from the manufacturers stated that “when running off a ‘making’ of a dark blue paper the sparrows that had access to the machine-room insisted in alighting on the paper-pulp, travelling along the machine ‘wire’ (a kind of endless wire gauze band that feeds the wet pulp to the ro litas).

“Several of the birds wore caught in the rollers and crushed into the pulp, thus spoiling that part of the paper.

“After several occurrences of this nature a boy bad to be specially stationed by the machine to scare the birds away. UNRESPONSIVE TO OTHER COLOURS.

“The birds made no attempt to act in a similar manner when other colours of exactly similar paper were run off.” A sample of the fatal siaty-blue paper—a thought duller in tone than the traditional j blue of a paper sugar bag—was given to | me. It is a stiff high-class cover paper ! such as would be used to bind a pamphlet |or small official publication. No smell could jbe traced, and a representative of the firm said that- he could not understand how the dark wet pulp appealed to the senses of a j sparrow.

One suggestion made at the Zoological Society’s offices was that the birds wore thirsty and mistook the moving pulp for water, but a single dip of a beak would show them they were wrong, and, after all, it looks nothing like water. Someone also pointed out that the colour was almost the exact shade of the RAF uniform. He asked if that might not have a deadly fascination for the R,A_F.’b rivals*? Who can provide the true solution?