How citizen movements across India are bringing the friendly sparrows back to the neighbourhood

Sky-high impact can be created from the grassroots. The myriad local movements, which have together revived the once-embattled house sparrow in India’s urban spaces, are living proof

Earlier this year, a group of naturalists at Salem Ornithological Foundation tracked the sparrow, but with laptops instead of binoculars. On eBird, an online database of all sightings across India, the team trawled for entries on the common house sparrow — whose diminishing population around urban India has been a point of alarm for over a decade.

The team looked at sparrow sightings across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and mapped them out district by district. Chennai district, for instance, has seen sparrow sightings in almost every three-kilometre stretch over the past 10 years. All these maps were put together, along with an interactive map of the entire State, in a final report that confidently declares that Tamil Nadu’s sparrow population is now stable. 

The team, led by Ganeswar SV, does not make this claim lightly. “What we are seeing over the period is not so much a population decline, as a shift towards areas with less urban activity. Rural and semi-urban areas of the State have plenty of sightings; it is the urban areas that are seeing fewer sparrows.” The team is still working on collating these population numbers — “it is a huge task” — their current project solely points out where sparrows have been sighted, where they haven’t, and where data is unavailable.

WWF India’s IUCN Red List has also kept the bird in the least concerned category for years. So our friendly winged neighbours might be fine, but urban India still misses them dearly.

Hence, the past decade has seen grassroots movements spring up in cities and towns across the country to revive these sparsely-sighted birds, and many of these initiatives have produced clear results. Often, these movements were focused on a single town or city, spearheaded by just one person or two. But the end goal has always been ambitious: to involve citizens by the hundreds in a joint effort to encourage these birds to return to the city.

A key name behind these scattered movements is Nashik-based Mohammed Dilawar, who can at least partially be credited for popularising March 20 as World Sparrow Day. World Sparrow Day is a joint initiative by the India-based Nature Forever Society (NFS) — founded by Dilawar with sparrow conservation as a key point of focus — and the France-based Eco-Sys Action Foundation of France.

N Dhanasekar, founder of Coimbatore-based Chitukuruvigal Arakkattalai, which has been working towards protecting house sparrows and their habitat for over a decade, says that their association with humans dates back several centuries. He adds, “They lived in colonies, and their nests dotted almost every house in the neighbourhood as well as bus bays and railway stations. ” He explains how the birds encourage greener urban spaces by transporting seeds from forests to cities.