SAVE THE HOUSE SPARROW

“Eat fast or else the sparrows would nibble from your plate,” Mohammad E Dilawar recalled his grandma cajoling him as a toddler, with cute House Sparrows – plenty of them – listening, chirping and hopping gleefully in the courtyard.

This is not just Dilawar’s boyhood story. It’s also similar to many of ours filled with myth, folklore and love. Such occasional memories, of chiding grandmas cleaning Rice in courtyards watched by our emotionally-attached family of birds and animals, come fluttering back.

But now courtyards are a luxury. In their place “designer gardens” and exotic plants, with little ecological role, have taken space. Foliages and flowers washed squeaky clean with chemicals.

The urban space has turned grotesque with “match-box buildings.” Almost everyone trying to cocoon into one’s individual space.

“The web of life is so intricately connected that nobody can say I can survive alone,” Dilawar says philosophically. “From the biggest whale to the smallest worm, everyone needs everybody.”For Dilawar, time has changed since he was spoon-fed by his grandma, watched by hundreds of mocking House Sparrows. He has grown up. No longer needs to be cajoled by his grandma to eat and there are less of the brown plumaged friends staring with their dark meaningful eyes.

“My mission is to bring the House Sparrows’ (Passer Domesticus) song back into our homes,” the environmentalist and a member of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) vowed. Dilawar is heading a three-year project sponsored by the Ministry for Environment and Forest to save sparrows in India.

Why House Sparrows? “House Sparrows follow human beings and nest near human settlement. Any decline in their number is an indicator of things going wrong in the space we live,” Dilawar recognized as a “hero” by the august Time magazine in 2008 said.

At present, he explains, all the wrong things are working against the sparrow at the same time contributing to their declining numbers.

The young ones of sparrows feed on an exclusive diet of worms and insects. But many of these are perishing due to pollution. Chemicals like Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether formed due to combustion of unleaded petrol kills small insects and worms, the diet of sparrow chicks, the young ornithologists in his 20’s said.Vanishing courtyards, cramped match-box buildings in smoky unfriendly cities with no tenancy are moreover driving out House Sparrows. Besides, in India with 1.5 million cellular phone subscribers being added every month, mobile companies are hoisting n-number of towers. These are killers with their microwaves emission.

“The microwaves from mobile towers not only kill small worms and insects it also inhibits hatching of sparrow eggs,” he points out.

Dilawar who was in Assam some years back on a study tour says tea gardens also have replaced traditional hedges with exotic ones. “Traditionally in tea gardens of Assam Adulsa and Heena was planted. Now these are being replaced by exotic ones such as Duranta which does not support many insects and worms and the sparrows are left with no cleaning-up job to do.”

If the sparrows and other common birds that feed on small worms and insects are lost, a time may come when pesticide -insecticide-resistant variant worms and insects would colonise our farms and gardens, Dilawar cautions.

Sadly, in India like in many parts of the world there has been no documentation on the declining numbers of House Sparrows. “When I first told my professors five years back about sparrows and their declining number after going through research papers from UK, everyone was in a state of denial. But after giving it a second thought almost everyone came back and said ‘yes I do see a lot less sparrows these days,’” he said.

With his emotional attachment to save these small, humble birds, Dilawar with friends and colleagues has also started a social organization – Nature Forever Society (NFS,) http://www.natureforever.org/– in Nashik Maharastra, his hometown.

On March 20 this year, NFS together with BNHS, Avon wildlife (UK), Cornel Lab of Ornithology (USA), Eco-Sys Action Foundation ( France) and other organisations worldwide celebrated the first World House Sparrow Day.

Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit inaugurate the event in India. Similar events was also organised in Rajasthan, Gujarat, South India and other parts of the country.

“School children would participate in drawing, elocution and other events. The idea is to reach out to the younger generation to be part of the conservation effort,” Dilawar added.

Undeterred by fund constraints, Dilawar adds his objective is to start a Common Bird Monitoring System (CBMS) in India. Such a system would inform in advance on threats posed to the feathered-friend.

“CBMS would be an Internet-based system. The common men can report about the common birds’ sightings, numbers and locations by logging in the data on the Internet for further compilation by experts,” he added.

Years back, vultures were being wiped out in India almost to extinction after eating cattle cadavers administered with Diclofenac Sodium. The inflammatory drug was given as painkillers to cattle. Nobody knew about it. CBMS would ensure that such a situation never recurs.

For now Dilawar wants everyone to extend a helping grain-full of hands to the cute sparrow, which in turn would help save other birds, animals and even human beings.

“It’s a myth that only animals and birds in the forest need protection and not common birds and animals that live close to us,” he says.

Presently, NFS has been producing “Nest-boxes” and distributing these to people who care about the environment. “Many sparrows take residence in these nest-boxes readily and people call me up and say ‘there are newborns in the nest-boxes’…these developments are the biggest reward for me,” he says.

“The time is to act now for every one of us before it is too late,” he suggests.

Although he does not give much thought about the future, but believes people would certainly get emotionally attached to save their helpless and dependent “co-tenant.”

Perhaps the best way to sum up Dilawar’s and our story is to take a cue from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man” which philosophises…

Oh blindness to the future! Kindly giv’n/That each may fill the circle mark’d by heav’n/Who sees with equal eye, as God of all/A hero perish, or a sparrow fall.