A wake up call!

While driving through the lower Shivalik Range of Mountains, I spotted    a House Sparrow.  It reminded of my school days, when hundreds of house sparrows hovered around our house in Chandigarh, chirping merrily all the day around.  As a matter of fact we woke up every morning with their chirping getting louder.

They used to build their nests in the hedge and at times in the balcony and even under the tube light shades. I recall my mother used to get upset with their nuisance, especially by their droppings but at the same time she used to keep grains for their feeding. It was probably love and hate relationship.

 Now these little birds have become a rare sight in Chandigarh and I believe in many other cities.  To my surprise, March 20 has been dedicated as World House Sparrow Day, clearly indicating that something is amiss.  A little research shows that it has already been put on red alert.

Known to be social birds living in groups, chirping and chattering to communicate with each other and have co-existed with humans for centuries mostly in urban areas.   The male and female house sparrows are easily distinguishable by their coloration. The male is dark brown, with a black bib, grey chest and white cheeks, whereas the female is light brown throughout its body, with no black bib, crown or white cheeks... It feeds mostly on seeds, but in the breeding season, adults feed their young with insects. These birds are found of mud bathing, leaving behind a dip in the earth and being protective of it. Sounds strange?

The reasons for the decline of house sparrows   are many. These include  the changing designs of infrastructure does not support sparrow breeding , lack of availability of  quality food, increasing use of pesticides, pollution caused especially by microwave (mobile) towers, less of grasslands, use of concrete walls for boundaries rather than the hedges.

Time to take a serious call on saving the house sparrow and encourage its breeding lest the imbalance in urban biodiversity may ultimately adversely affect the human species itself. A small step could be to adopt customized feedboxes, an initiative of World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

It is a wakeup call!