26 May,2009 07:47 AM IST | | Varun Singh
With grain stores shifting inside supermarkets, the bird has lost its source of food; 50 per cent of population decimated
Supermarkets may be crowd-pullers when it comes to people, but they are the reason that the sparrow has become a rare bird in the city. Over the past five years, more than 50 per cent of the sparrows in the city have disappeared and animal activists say that we have urbanisation to blame.
"The population of sparrows in the city has declined by half and the primary reason is that they do not find enough food. The birds generally feed on grains from grain stores and mandis, which have now shifted indoors.
With the arrival of malls and air-conditioned stores, the sparrows do not find food out in the open," said Mohammed Dilawar, a former ornithologist with Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and founder of Nature Forever Society, an NGO specialising in the dwindling population of common birds.u00a0
"With packed food available in supermarkets, sun drying of food grains has become a thing of the past. This source of food for the sparrows has also disappeared," he added.u00a0
According to Lt Col Dr J C Khanna, secretary, the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the sparrow population in the city has dropped by nearly 60 per cent over the past few years. "This is all because of the conversion of kirana stores into malls. With no intake of food, the reproduction and the health of the birds gets affected. Moreover, people often destroy nests in their housing societies, even though it causes no harm to them," he said.u00a0u00a0
Around the worldu00a0u00a0
According to Dilawar, London has seen a 98 per cent drop in the sparrow population and in the United Kingdom the numbers have gone down by 60 to 70 per cent, over the years. But sparrows are not uncommon in smaller towns.
Mayor's sparrow shelter
In January 2008, Mayor Shubha Raul installed a sparrow shelter at her Shivaji Park bungalow, but recently gave it away.
"I installed a shelter as sparrows play a vital role in the ecology. But, the shelter at my bungalow did not attract any birds and I gave it away. However, citizens should keep such shelters to preventu00a0 the population of sparrows in the city from dwindling," advised the Mayor.
