Time was when a clutch of sparrows on your window sill was a common sight. Rapid urbanisation and attendant pollution have made it a rare one now.
Lone campaigner in Uttar Pradesh builds plaster of Paris nests to save the sparrow in urban areas
LUCKNOW: Time was when a clutch of sparrows on your window sill was a common sight. Rapid urbanisation and attendant pollution have made it a rare one now.
The common house sparrow faces virtual extinction in urban India. And a lone crusader in a remote part of UP is fighting to tip the ecological balance in favour of the little bird.
Prakash Vijay (45) of Sultanpur district is no ornithologist or conservationist. He is just a simple man working on a self-appointed mission to bring back sparrows to each house.
Prakash has fashioned nests out of plaster of Paris which he hangs on trees outside houses of those willing to aid his “save the sparrow” campaign. He has also been hanging the nests at government offices in Sultanpur and Lucknow. He has designed the nests himself and is spending his own money on this drive.
“My only objective in life now is to see the sparrows twittering in every house like we used to see them in our childhood,” says Vijay, a small-time trader, who launched this mission sometime last year when he noticed the sharp decline in sparrows around his house.
“I am afraid the next generation living in cities will only see the sparrow in pictures,” he laments.
Says ornithologist MB Krishna: “There is no monitoring of sparrow population in India, unlike Europe which has a systematic programme to keep track of environmental changes.”
UP’s former chief wildlife warden RL Singh says: “The vanishing sparrow is an ominous signal of how pollution is damaging our ecological balance. We never recorded the population of the house sparrow. Perhaps it was so common that no one felt the need.”
Singh points out that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in UK had even appointed sparrow recovery officers after it noticed the number of sparrows had fallen by 90% since 1970. He laments no such efforts have ever been made here.
According to the internationally-renowned theory of Denis Summers-Smith, world expert on the sparrow, unleaded fuel, believed to be eco-friendly, has by-products which kill small insects.
As a result, food for birds feeding on insects becomes scarce. Though adult sparrows can survive without insects, they need them to feed their young. With fewer insects, infant mortality rates of sparrow went up.
GS Rawat of the Wildlife Institute of India (Dehradun) says these birds normally build their nests below tiled roofs, now a thing of the past. Also, they fed on grain in backyards where women cleaned paddy or wheat. But now, there are no backyards.
Prakash Vijay is undeterred.
He plans to launch a nature club and involve schools in his drive. “We will have to sensitise our children as it is they who will carry the task ahead.”
g_deepak@dnaindia.net
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