Sky-high impact can be created from the grassroots. The myriad local movements, which have together revived the once-embattled house sparrow in India’s urban spaces, are living proof
Sky-high impact can be created from the grassroots. The myriad local movements, which have together revived the once-embattled house sparrow in India’s urban spaces, are living proof
Earlier this year, a group of naturalists at Salem Ornithological Foundation tracked the sparrow, but with laptops instead of binoculars. On eBird, an online database of all sightings across India, the team trawled for entries on the common house sparrow — whose diminishing population around urban India has been a point of alarm for over a decade.
The team looked at sparrow sightings across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and mapped them out district by district. Chennai district, for instance, has seen sparrow sightings in almost every three-kilometre stretch over the past 10 years. All these maps were put together, along with an interactive map of the entire State, in a final report that confidently declares that Tamil Nadu’s sparrow population is now stable.
The team, led by Ganeswar SV, does not make this claim lightly. “What we are seeing over the period is not so much a population decline, as a shift towards areas with less urban activity. Rural and semi-urban areas of the State have plenty of sightings; it is the urban areas that are seeing fewer sparrows.” The team is still working on collating these population numbers — “it is a huge task” — their current project solely points out where sparrows have been sighted, where they haven’t, and where data is unavailable.
WWF India’s IUCN Red List has also kept the bird in the least concerned category for years. So our friendly winged neighbours might be fine, but urban India still misses them dearly.
Hence, the past decade has seen grassroots movements spring up in cities and towns across the country to revive these sparsely-sighted birds, and many of these initiatives have produced clear results. Often, these movements were focused on a single town or city, spearheaded by just one person or two. But the end goal has always been ambitious: to involve citizens by the hundreds in a joint effort to encourage these birds to return to the city.
A key name behind these scattered movements is Nashik-based Mohammed Dilawar, who can at least partially be credited for popularising March 20 as World Sparrow Day. World Sparrow Day is a joint initiative by the India-based Nature Forever Society (NFS) — founded by Dilawar with sparrow conservation as a key point of focus — and the France-based Eco-Sys Action Foundation of France.
Centuries-old friendship
N Dhanasekar, founder of Coimbatore-based Chitukuruvigal Arakkattalai, which has been working towards protecting house sparrows and their habitat for over a decade, says that their association with humans dates back several centuries. He adds, “They lived in colonies, and their nests dotted almost every house in the neighbourhood as well as bus bays and railway stations. ” He explains how the birds encourage greener urban spaces by transporting seeds from forests to cities.
K Dhanasekar of Coimbatore-based Chitukuruvigal Arakkattalai holding an artificial nest box that can be placed on terraces, windows and compound walls to attract the sparrows
Dhanasekar points out that house sparrows are indicators of a thriving urban biodiversity. “They feed on worms and small insects in farmlands. Rampant use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides have wiped away their vital nutritious food,” he says, emphasising the need for more organic farming.
Dilawar agrees, stating that the rampant use of pesticides has killed the insects that feed sparrow babies. He adds that shrinking green spaces and modern architecture contributed to the decline as the birds could not find enough spaces to nest. “At that point of time, to arrest the decline of sparrows creating secondary habitats was the most critical thing to do,” says Dilawar.
How to help the sparrow
In 2005, when Dilawar spearheaded a sparrow housing movement by setting up nest boxes, bird feeders and water bowls in urban spaces with the help of volunteers from across India. Apart from its base in Mumbai and Nashik, Dilawar’s NFS has city coordinators in places like New Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluru who spread awareness to create an ecosystem of bird feeders and nests in schools and residential localities.
School children watch keenly as volunteers of Green Climate team explain about protection of sparrows, at a programme organised at KDPM high school, ahead of World Sparrow Day, in Visakhapatnam
| Photo Credit: KR Deepak
In Andhra Pradesh’s coastal city of Visakhapatnam, environmental NGO Green Climate organises annual workshops in schools and colleges on how to make bird feeders from discarded plastic bottles, clay pots, coconut shells and bamboo baskets. They have also been highlighting the importance of native plant species, which support the birds, by reaching out to educational institutions in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
As World Sparrow Day approaches on March 20, Dhanasekar will be holding awareness meetings, camps at educational institutions, and Government schools, as well as distributing nest boxes and bird feeders to homes and institutions .“This year, we have inscribed a Thirukkural couplet on the nest boxes so that the children can recollect the Thirukkural while also bringing the birds back,” he smiles.
“We have to keep the conversation going, especially among students,” says Dhanasekar who spoke to over thousand students last Sunday at the 125th meeting of Chitukuruvigal Arakkattalai held at Thoothukudi. encouraging them to build makeshift nests and create safe nooks in and around their homes.“Most students got materials like used cardboard boxes, shoe boxes, bottles and coconut husks, which can be upcycled as nest boxes. Besides physical and online seminars, we also upload one-minute and two-minute videos on how to make nest boxes and bird feeders (discarded bottles can be used to fill grains and hung upside down to attract birds). Once we make them aware, they come up with innovative ideas.”
On a larger scale
Dilawar believes that a sustainable long-term answer to the conservation of many other common species of birds lies in creating and nurturing primary habitats like creating parklands with native plant species. To do this he started the Native Plant Research Conservation Centre in Nashik in Maharashtra, which now has over 400 species and has helped create many high-density urban city forests that are critical for the habitat of birds. He adds, “We shifted our focus to an ecosystem-based approach with the house sparrow as the keystone species. Ours is a fight to conserve not just the house sparrow count, but to save all the common birds and biodiversity found in our immediate environment.”
