India: Where have all the sparrows gone?

India ropes in citizens for a nationwide study to try and find the answer
Nirmala Ganapathy Straits Times 15 Apr 12;

As recently as a decade ago, the house sparrow was the most ubiquitous bird in India, chirping away and pecking at the ground in any city.

But the unassuming, brown-feathered bird with a white underbelly has all but disappeared in India's massive urbanisation drive.

Shrinking green spaces, growing use of pesticides and chemicals, and even the telecom explosion have all been cited as possible reasons.

A 2009 study in the southern state of Kerala found that sparrows were building nests on mobile phone towers but their eggs never hatched. The study concluded that low-frequency electromagnetic waves were harming the thin skull of the chicks and their egg shells.

Ornithologists say no one really has the scientific data to explain why the sparrow population has fallen so precipitously.

Now the Bombay Natural History Society, a leading non-governmental organisation, has started an online campaign called Citizen Sparrow, supported by the Environment Ministry.

At www.citizensparrow.in, people are asked to fill out an online form with 18 questions, including where they have spotted sparrows and how often, to describe the locality, and say when mobile phone connections arrived there.

This will form the first comprehensive national study on India's disappearing sparrows.

'The causes are not easy to say because there hasn't been many studies in India,' said Dr Asad Rafi Rahmani, director of the Bombay Natural History Society.

It was not long ago that some countries considered the sparrow a pest. In China in 1958, the Chinese Communist Party asked people to exterminate it. Now in countries like Britain, studies have found that the sparrow population shrunk by more than two-thirds between 1994 and 2009.

'What we know is they have declined. With Citizen Sparrow we want to get all-India data and do a proper analysis,' said Dr Rahmani.

The request for a nationwide study came from the most unlikely of places: the Indian Parliament. In 2010, a group of legislators wanted to know why they were not seeing sparrows any more.

A question asked in Parliament piqued the interest of the Ministry of Environment and Dr Rahmani was roped in.

The project was launched on April 1 and by last Friday afternoon, 3,466 people had sent in 4,734 contributions about 3,892 locations. Researchers are hoping for 20,000 responses, the number needed for a comprehensive study. May31 is the last day for submitting responses.

One of the top contributors is Ms Sikhawali Hazarika, a 26-year-old research scholar in the geology department of Gauhati University in the north-eastern state of Assam. She recorded 17 sparrow sightings in two weeks.

'When I went to my father's family home (in Assam), all us cousins used to play hide and seek, and whenever we would go into the greenhouse, there would be a lot of sparrows and they would fly away. It became a game. But now their numbers are decreasing,' she said.

The sheer volume of responses has thrilled the campaigners.

Mr Chirag Sharma from the northern state of Punjab writes that he rarely sees the small bird any more.

But Mr Ehtesham Hasnain from the eastern state of Bihar says there are so many sparrows around him, they are even building nests in his house.

'Winters, the sparrows generally make their nests on the ceiling fans in our home. But as the summer comes we have to sadly remove those beautiful nests as the fans have to be put to work,' he said.

Such 'citizen science' projects are quite common in Europe, where people report bird sightings in their gardens or surrounding areas. But it is not common in India.

In addition, researchers are doing longer-term field studies in Bangalore, which has far fewer sparrows than before.

'We will then see if the results of field work and website information correlate. It is high time we came up with data at the national level so we can tell scientifically what is happening to the sparrow,' said Citizen Sparrow head S. Karthik.

Wildlife photographer Ganesh Raghunathan has shared 16 sightings with Citizen Sparrow. For him, sparrows remain a part of his childhood.

'At school and in college we used to spot so many sparrows. It is very sad that they have declined,' he said.