FLOYD VAN ERT traps English sparrows as a service to the United States of America. He is seventy-one years old and slightly rotund, and he dresses comfortably—usually in shorts, heavy work shoes, and a baseball cap. He lives near Carson, Iowa, about twenty miles east of Omaha, Nebraska.

Floyd does not like the word kill applied to his work. When pressed, he will admit to disposing of English sparrows, but he much prefers to describe his work as the control of English sparrows. Floyd devotes most of his waking hours to the designing, testing, manufacturing, and selling of sparrow traps. Since he retired from his own commercial glass shop and took to building traps in 1995, he’s sold about eight thousand devices of his own design. His designs include the Universal Sparrow Trap, the PVC Sparrow Trap, and—his personal pride and joy—the Urban/Country Sparrow Nest Box Trap.

By his own admission, Floyd doesn’t even earn minimum wage for his efforts as a trap designer. As he’s quick to point out, he does what he does for altruistic reasons; he does not desire financial reward. He’s prone to giving traps away, often sells traps at a loss, and freely invites people to steal his trap designs from his website (www.vanerttraps.com). If a person was looking to pirate a sparrow trap design, that person could do worse than stealing one from Floyd Van Ert. On his ten-acre spread and testing grounds along the West Nishna Bounty River, Floyd has trapped over four thousand sparrows in the last five years. His traps work. Period.

If Floyd’s a hard man with English sparrows, that’s only because he’s a soft man with the eastern bluebird, a beautiful and semirare indigenous creature that suffers mightily at the beak of the English sparrow. The bluebird needs holes where it can lay its eggs, preferably in old trees and stumps and farmyard fence posts, and sparrows often occupy all the available holes.

When Floyd first set out to help save the bluebird, he went into the workshop behind his house and built bluebird nesting boxes with bluebird-sized holes in the doors. He hung the boxes on trees and fence posts, then watched helplessly as most of the boxes were overrun by English sparrows. The few bluebirds he attracted were evicted by sparrows, which tossed the bluebird nests out of the boxes and cracked open the eggs they’d held. When the sparrows found bluebird hatchlings inside the boxes, they pecked the baby birds to death.

The terrible ferocity of the English sparrow makes Floyd unapologetic about his work. If anyone ever did question Floyd’s morals as a sparrow trapper, Floyd would hand that person his sparrow-trapper résumé. When I went to Iowa, seeking Floyd’s advice on how to better catch sparrows, he gave me my own copy. It includes a list of the environmental organizations he belongs to: Iowa Bluebird Conservationists; Bluebirds Across Nebraska; American Bird Conservation Association; North America Bluebird Society. When Floyd showed me this list, he said, “People ask me, ‘Well, why haven’t you gotten hate mail, for as much as you’re known all over the United States for trapping sparrows?’ Well, I’ve never got a hate mail.” He then pointed his finger at me. “And I never talk about killing,” he said. “I might talk a little bit about disposing. But killing’s a big word.”

Although Floyd Van Ert kills enough sparrows to open an all-you-can-eat buffet, he’s never eaten one of the birds. In fact, I was the first guy he’d ever heard of who wanted to trap sparrows in order to eat them. Before I visited him, I requested that he start saving sparrows for me to supplement whatever we happened to catch together. He let me know that he was not excited about saving the birds. “I’d rather flick a sparrow into the bushes than wrap it up and put it into my freezer next to my food,” he told me. But he was true to his word and saved me a medley of twenty-seven sparrows and starlings.

If Floyd was mad at me for making him save sparrows, he got over it rather quickly when he started showing me around his place. He likes giving tours. Before we set out to explore his property, he pulled his socks up to his knees to protect his legs from the tall vegetation. He started his tour just outside the front door of the house, explaining that he did not actually own the land or the house; it belonged to his second wife, Marty, who was quite a bit younger than Floyd. Marty was at work on the day we toured the property, but Floyd mentioned her often. He said he couldn’t get over how much he loved her. He put it this way: “I’ve got a six-CD Bose stereo in my car, and when she’s in there I don’t even turn it on. We just like to talk.” He thought their relationship derived strength from the fact that they each maintained their independence. Every month Marty gave Floyd a bill for what he owed in room and board at her house.

Marty is a bluebirder, which is what bluebird enthusiasts call themselves, and she introduced Floyd to bird conservation. One of their first projects together was to restore her property, which had been inundated with nonnative vegetation. Floyd persecuted the nonnative plants as vigorously as he persecutes nonnative birds. “I’ve got it all back to natives now,” he said. “This is all natural. Native grasses. Native wildflowers. It takes years to get it going and established. You really gotta care for it, but once you do it’s beautiful. It’s been fun, too. My wife and I spent twelve hundred dollars on seed alone. This land is now registered with the National Wildlife Federation as an official backyard wildlife habitat. That makes us proud. We’ve counted over one hundred species of birds on this land. Marty’s got a list inside, if you need to see it.”

We walked down a slight hill to the foot of a long meadow that stretched along the river. Floyd said that I should have seen the meadow the day before. Apparently, he’d had to mow the whole thing down because the wild lettuce was getting out of hand and threatening to choke out the other plants.

“This was a heck of a year for wild lettuce. It’s an annual, and you’ve got to get rid of it. Otherwise it will go to seed. It started to set blossoms, so I mowed it all down with my tractor. I was mowing flowers down this tall alongside it.” He held his hand up to his chest. “I about cried,” he said, his voice cracking. He looked away for a moment.

The next stop on the tour was a bluebird trail that coursed through the property. Floyd’s trail comprises a series of wooden nesting boxes, about the size of shoe boxes. During the bluebird nesting season, he tends the boxes every day.

He walks from one to the next, along his trail. Bluebirders often boast that bluebird trails are what saved the species from extinction. That’s not an outlandish claim. A hunter and naturalist named Dr. T. E. Musselman invented the idea of bluebird trails in Illinois back in the 1930s, just as the birds were starting to disappear. By the 1940s they had vanished from much of their traditional range. Dr. Lawrence Zeleny, who founded the North American Bluebird Society, popularized Musselman’s bluebird trail idea with his 1976 book, The Bluebird: How You Can Help Its Fight for Survival. In the twenty years following the book’s publication, bluebirds made a radical recovery, a success story considered by some to be the greatest grassroots conservation effort in American history.

When Floyd approaches one of his nest boxes, he talks loudly so that the parents will hear him, get scared, and fly off. The birds are only seven inches long, but they show up brightly, like tossed Frisbees, as they fly above the grass. Once the adults take off, Floyd opens the front of the boxes and makes sure that everything is going okay on the inside. He says that putting up a bluebird box and not monitoring it is worse than not putting up a bluebird box at all.

Floyd opened one of his boxes and was pleased to see five beautiful bluebird eggs arranged inside the nest. “She raised six babies out of here the first hatch,” he said. “Now she’ll raise five. I’ve had over sixty bluebird babies come off my land so far this year. If I didn’t monitor it, that number might be zero. If I didn’t trap sparrows, I might not have one nest.”

If Floyd opens one of his boxes and finds a sparrow nest, he scatters it and busts the eggs. Then he places one of his traps in the box to catch the culprits. He’s mainly after the adult male sparrows, which do the brunt of the bluebird killing. “An old male sparrow, he even looks mean,” said Floyd. “And he’s smart.”

I wanted Floyd to give me a rundown on how to use his sparrow traps effectively, but first he wanted to go down and get a burger and a pop from Dairy Queen. I drove. On the way back to his house, he tried to convince me to help him write a book about trapping sparrows in cities. Earlier he had told me that bluebirds didn’t like cities, and that city people didn’t care about saving bluebirds.

I said, “If there are no bluebirds in the cities, and city people don’t care about bluebirds, then why do city people need to know how to get rid of the sparrows?”

“Because they bitch all the time. I read ’em on the web. They hate sparrows in a city just as bad as a bluebirder does. They hate ’em. But those people don’t do anything about it.”

I wanted to pursue this conversation with Floyd, but he suddenly got very excited as we passed the bank. He demanded that I turn into the parking lot and guided me around to the back of the building. There he showed me a telephone pole with one of his bluebird traps mounted about six feet off the ground. It looked like a normal birdhouse, except the hole was blocked on the inside by a metal flap with an orange sticker pasted over it.

“This is fun,” he said. “I love this.” He got out of the car and pointed to the sticker. “See, this tells me the trap’s been set off, or tripped. Then I go over here and open this door.” He cracked open a small sliding door on the side of the trap. “I open it up about that far,” he said, “and pretty soon we see the beak.”

The beak belonged to a European starling. Floyd hates starlings almost as much as he hates English sparrows, and he hates them for the same reasons. He’s developing a line of traps for starlings. This trap was a prototype for his new design. Floyd said he was still working out the bugs in the system.

The starling wanted out in a big way. Floyd grabbed the bird’s long, yellowish beak through the small door. He held it, then opened up the front of the house and grabbed the bird by its body. He reset the trap and climbed into the car, cradling the bird in his lap. He said he couldn’t believe that anyone would eat one of these dirty things. We crossed the West Nishna Bounty River, drove up a hill, and pulled into Floyd’s yard. When he climbed out of the car, he realized that the bird had died in transit. “He had a heart attack,” Floyd said. “Here’s another bird for you to eat.” We walked into the house to listen to his phone messages. A woman from the bank was on there, telling Floyd that his starling trap was tripped.

When I told Floyd that I had been trying to catch sparrows with a box-and-stick trap over the winter, he just rolled his eyes. Floyd builds his traps from scratch, right from stock pieces of metal. He builds some of his own manufacturing equipment and buys the rest on eBay. He polishes the metal corners of his traps with a machine normally used to polish window glass. Once an engineer phoned Floyd to ask how he got such a nice polish on the corners of his metal. “He could hardly believe that’s how I did it,” Floyd told me.

Out in his workshop, Floyd showed me how the Universal Sparrow Trap works. He mounts the trap on the inside of a sparrow-infested bluebird box. When the sparrow comes in, it hits the trap’s trigger and the metal flap swings up, lightning fast, and blocks the hole so the sparrow can’t get out. Floyd held up a little block of wood that he wanted me to inspect. He uses the block to test the trigger tension on his traps.

“See how dirty this is?” he asked. “I’ve dropped this thousands of times. This weighs two-thirds of a sparrow’s weight. A sparrow weighs twenty-eight grams. When a sparrow drops down from the hole, it has built up velocity too. So it weighs more than twenty-eight grams, really. If I drop this block of wood and it trips the trap, then I know a sparrow is gonna get caught.”

Floyd’s traps are so reliable, he hardly needs to advertise. “A lot of my sales are word of mouth,” he said. “That’s what got my name started. Other guys who sell traps are just envious. They see me and they say, ‘How do you do it? You’re setting this world on fire.’ I say, ‘I ain’t doing anything. I’m just making a trap.’ ”

As Floyd explained the supremacy of his traps, he got excited and his voice rose. He could tell I liked hearing about them, so he pulled out a few of his competitors’ traps, which he keeps around as a form of amusement. Floyd held up one trap he considers particularly loathsome. To layman eyes, it was very similar to Floyd’s trap, though it lacked the durable yet delicate flourishes of workmanship.

“An old male sparrow is too smart for this trap. It’s worthless, because as soon as you put it in there, the sparrow won’t go in.” Floyd demonstrated how to install the trap in a bluebird box. He pointed to the hole. The trap had altered the hole’s appearance. “A sparrow will see that little bitty tiny cavity that wasn’t in the hole before. It sucks. You could put a different screw on the outside of the box and an old sparrow wouldn’t go in. I just hate this trap. The guy that built this is out of Ohio, and he thinks he’s got something. I know this guy personally. I asked him, ‘How many of these traps do you sell?’ He said, ‘Oh, couple hundred a year. Why, Floyd? How many of your traps do you sell?’ I just laughed. I didn’t tell him how many I sell.

“Look,” he went on. “The North America Bluebird Society had a bunch of different traps for sale on their website two years ago. And then the lady called me up and said, ‘We’re taking them all off. Except yours.’ She said, ‘You’ve got a trap. Those other ones are junk.’ And they put mine on the web and they sell them for eleven dollars. And I sell to them for six fifty. Everybody gets them for the same price. And I pay the freight.”

Though he’s sold traps to research scientists and municipalities, Floyd’s primary customers are bluebirders. “Bluebirders are older people,” he said. “If it weren’t for old people, bluebirds would have disappeared. That’s who I sell my traps to. I just send them out, before I get paid. No credit cards or nothing. But I always get paid. I’m working with a different class of people. They’re bluebirders and they’re honest people.”

An MBA would cringe at Floyd’s business model. There is no difference between his retail sales plan and his wholesale plan. There’s a guy in Tennessee who sells Floyd’s Universal Sparrow Trap inside one of Floyd’s boxes for forty-nine dollars. Floyd sells the same setup for twenty-one dollars. And the Tennessee guy doesn’t even buy the products straight from Floyd. He gets them from some other retailer. Floyd doesn’t even know who.

“Why don’t you call that Tennessee guy up?” I asked. “You could sell the traps to him at a higher price than you usually charge but at a lower price than he’s currently paying. And why don’t you patent your designs?”

“Because I don’t care. He’s buying ’em from someone who bought ’em from me. It’s not like he’s stealing ’em. If I sell a Universal trap to you for six fifty, and you turn around and sell it to Joe Blow for ten fifty, I’m not going to call Joe Blow and steal your customer. It’s wrong. You’ve got to be happy at some point.

“For me, I’m happy to make a good trap. I’ve got a handle on this trap market. My traps, they just trap sparrows like crazy. If I kept my feedback, you wouldn’t have time to read it all. I have the best trap on the market. I know that I do. Everybody tells me that. And I don’t do it for money. I do it for recognition.”