The sparrow in Goraiya Gram

The bird has vanished from most cities. A village has been specially designed to protect it

SIX YEARS AGO, in this newspaper, I had written an article on the disappearing sparrow ('I'd rather be a sparrow,' IE, February 22, 2018). It is time to revisit the sparrow.

There is a Simon and Garfunkel song, ‘I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail’. The forests are no longer an option. They have been taken over by streets and we no longer feel the Earth beneath our feet. What is Delhi’s state bird? General knowledge questions involve the national bird (peacock). Rarely are we asked about state birds. Thanks to the Hornbill Festival, many people may think the hornbill is Nagaland’s state bird. It isn’t. Nagaland’s state bird is Blyth's tragopan, a kind of pheasant. The hornbill is a state bird in Arunachal and Kerala. Since 2012, Delhi’s state bird has been the house sparrow. (Before that, Delhi had no state bird.) One needs to specify that it's the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), since there are other sparrows.

It’s odd that Delhi’s state bird should be a sparrow, since sparrows have vanished from Delhi. From 2010, March 20 has also been celebrated as World Sparrow Day. Some 50 years ago, when we used to be students in Delhi, sparrows were a common sight. No longer. I presume students still declaim from Hamlet, “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” One shouldn’t blame providence for the fall of the house sparrow. It has more to do with human development and urbanisation.

One can go to Goraiya Gram to see a sparrow. “Goraiya” means a house sparrow and this village for sparrows has been set up in Garhi Mandu forest, one of the four city forests in Delhi. There are many words for sparrow in Sanskrit. The most common is chataka. But the one I like most is grihabalibhuj, since it captures the nature of a house sparrow. It is a bird that feeds on offerings strewn around the house.

There is a long list of reasons cited for the fall of the sparrow. Some of them are not immediately obvious. In 1898, there was an international conference on horsedung. There were an estimated 3,00,000 horses in London in 1900 and some 1,70,000 in New York. One needed to handle the horse-dung and urine. There were concerns that urban centres would be swamped under heaps of dung. This didn’t happen, because automobiles drove horses out of business and eventually, horse traffic was banned. These workhorses were fed grain and grain had spillages, which sparrows fed on.

On the net, I found a delightful essay by W H Bergtold, written in 1921 (published in The Auk) and titled, ‘The English Sparrow (Passer domesticus) and the Motor Vehicle’. “Fifteen years ago one could see on any of the crowded business streets of Denver, dozens, nay, hundreds of English Sparrows, and the air was then resonant with their shrill notes of love, war and alarm; …To what can this changed condition be attributed? Increase of enemies, mortality by disease, changing environment, or lessening of food supply, all of these, and perhaps more, might be cited as possible causes...obviously, there is but one cause to which one can attribute the great shrinkage in the equine population of this city, namely the displacement of the harnessed horse by the motor vehicle; …While it has been almost unnoticed, it has been none the less certain and effective; the self-propelled vehicles of a city affect the sparrow not only through starvation, but probably also through making the species’ street life so hazardous and fatal as to drive it largely out of the business areas.” You should read the entire essay. As I said, reasons you won’t immediately think of, reminding you of Ian Malcolm’s butterfly effect.

There will be a host of reasons cited by ornithologists. But I wonder about nests built by sparrows. When we were young, houses had ventilators and invariably, sparrows built nests in ventilators, sometimes, on tops of ceiling fans. I can’t remember, in an age of air-conditioning, the last time I saw a ventilator. Modern urban architecture robs sparrows of their nesting sites. Humans migrate from rural areas to urban. I guess sparrows have taken the reverse route. I have seen sparrows outside Delhi. The State of India’s Birds report shows there is still a declining trend (in number of sparrows), but with some reversal in recent years. There is a greater concern about sparrows and something like Eco Roots Foundation provides nests and people have taken to feeding sparrows. Other than architectural design, there are other factors. Where will sparrows get food? Home gardens have virtually vanished in metros. Insecticides and pesticides have got rid of insects. I remember an article from Down to Earth. To quote, “Subramanya, a Sacon (Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History) member in the National Wetland Conservation Programme and currently working with the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, confirms the decline of sparrows in Bangalore. He attributes it to the lack of nesting sites in modern concrete buildings, disappearing kitchen gardens and the non-availability of a particular larvae (Helicoverpa armigera), associated with the field bean… Formerly, urban households in India used to buy field beans as pods in vegetable markets. When the pod was broken, larvae came out, to be promptly devoured by sparrows. But now that fresh seeds are available in packets, these larvae have disappeared, depriving the sparrow.”

If the house sparrow loses its food and habitat, what can it possibly do, but to move to Goraiya Gram?

The writer is chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the PM. Views are personal