BENGALURU: We all admire the tiny sparrow that would come to our balcony every morning, but not many of us knew that March 20, last Sunday, was a day dedicated to it?
The date was declared World Sparrow Day by the Nature Forever Society of India in collaboration with the Eco-Sys Action Foundation (France) and a host of other national and international organisations. This was because they felt that there is a serious threat to this small bird which has helped humans control insects and pests that destroy our crops.
Some Interesting facts
The male and female house sparrows don’t look similar. The male bird has reddish brown back, a black throat patch and a white chin, while the female has a brown back with stripes.
Sparrows are basically insectivores, but since they got associated with humans, they gradually changed their eating habits. Sparrows eat moths, caterpillars and other small insects, but they also like eating seeds, small berries and fruits.
They can fly at 35 kmph and swim to a certain extent to escape from predators like cats. They, ideally, can live in the wild for about five years. They are social and live in colonies called flocks. While they do not migrate, they fly to nearby villages in search of grain fields.
They love dust-bathing, which helps them get rid of any tiny insects bothering them. They are fond of caterpillars that feed on avarekai. They feed their young ones with juicy and protein-rich caterpillars.
Threats and disturbances
There are various reasons for the drastic decline in the number of these birds.
1Construction of our houses - House sparrows are known to barge into houses -- provided they have tiled roofs or ventilators. They nest inside our houses, thereby earning their name as house sparrows. These days, the design in which we build our houses does not leave space for these birds to freely come in.
2. Use of chemicals: These house sparrows would regularly visit the grain and vegetable fields, in search of caterpillars to feed their young ones. But now, there are hardly any such fields for these birds to forage. Even the ones that exist are heavily infused with pesticides and insecticides.
3Rice cleaning: In the past, rice was cleaned from paddy, small stones and other small seeds. This activity has now fully stopped. These birds would be seen close to this activity to gobble up discarded seeds. But now everything is mechanised and the cleaning work is done in closed environments.
4Increase in mobile towers - The advent of mobile towers that emit strong signals are also known to deter them.
Hence, it all started during the mid-20th century when a lot of emphasis was given to industrialisation.
At the same time, even the agricultural revolution took off parallelly. While boosting agricultural output, chemicals, fertilisers, insecticides, pesticides, were used to increase the yield of crops. This continued for a long time. Eventually it had a very detrimental effect on most of our birds.
(The writer is a member of Birdwatchers Field Club of Bangalore)