This Sangam city housewife turns into a sparrow saviour
Moved by the plight of house sparrows, fast disappearing from cities, a Sangam city housewife, Saumya Mishra, has turned into a sparrow-saving activist during the lockdown.
Using social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, she is teaching neighbours and others how to make bird-feeders and nests using old kitchen jars, plastic water bottles and cardboard boxes, and spreading the ‘save little bird’ message with zeal, to help bring back sparrows’ chirps into city homes.
“I grew up feeding house sparrows at my parents’ and grandparents’ house in my village in Gopalganj district of Bihar. They were always a part of my life. But after marriage, in 2013, when I came to Prayagraj, I found sparrows absent and soon started to miss them. However, like most people, I did nothing,” said Saumya, 34, a resident of Handia.
After years of reading about the sparrows and their dwindling population in cities, one lazy afternoon in February 2020 she decided to make a cardboard box and hung it in her small balcony with grains of paddy (dhaan), sorghum (jowar) and pearl millet (bajra) near it and a bowl of water. “For days nothing happened. But after about five days, I noticed a pair of sparrows feeding. Buoyed by it, I put up a few more handmade bird feeders in other areas of my house and more sparrows appeared from nowhere much to my delight,” said Saumya with a smile.
Soon her husband, Saurabh, a school teacher and her two children, aged 7 and 3, also started helping her out. The morning and evening chirps of the sparrows soon attracted the attention of neighbours and they too followed suit.
As the news spread and people started contacting her wanting to know ways to make bird feeders and the way to nurture them, Saumya began giving advice through her Facebook account. In a matter of days the number of ‘friends’ swelled from 60-70 to over 500.
But then came the Covid-19 outbreak and the lockdown followed. “On the advice of my husband, I then formed a WhatsApp group ‘Gauraiya Bachao Group’ and soon over 600 people joined it, not just from all over Prayagraj but also different cities of UP like Lucknow, Varanasi and Gorakhpur, and other states like Punjab (Patiala) and Bihar (Motihari),” said Saumya.