Today is 10th World Sparrow Day. This is a day dedicated to raise awareness about the threat to the common house sparrow population.
The first World Sparrow Day was celebrated on 20th March, 2010. Since then, it's been celebrated on this day every year. This initiative was taken by Nature Forever Society of India in collaboration with the Eco-Sys Action Foundation (France) and several other organizations. Indian conservationist Mohammed Dilawar started helping the cause of house sparrows in Nashik and founded Nature Forever Society of India.
It's shocking how quickly sparrows disappeared from the urban landscape. When I was a child, the house sparrows were so ubiquitous that when I learned the word chidiya ("bird" in Hindi), I started to identify this word with Gauraiyas (house sparrows) as these were the only birds I used to see readily.
There were so many sparrows all around that often they used to fell victim to a running fan in the house when they used to accidentally flew into it.
But today, I haven't seen any house sparrow for several years now. Have you seen any house sparrow?
I wonder what happened to their population. It's said that because of vanishing green cover in cities, there is no more nesting place for these birds. But I see that even places with good green cover do no have any house sparrows.
Some say it's because of increased mobile & TV radiation. In that case, I don't see that these birds can ever be expected back! But as far as I remember, they disappeared even before the mobile phones penetrated in my city.
I don't know how celebrating World Sparrow Day can revive their population. Most of the activities planned around this day is limited to painting, debate, essay-writing & fancy dress competition for school children. Dunno how it's going to save these species!
For others it's suggested to keep a bowl of water and some grain to feed these birds. But it's the pigeons who benefit from such activities and not the house sparrows. So it will only help growing the pigeon population.
Some places that still have some house sparrow population organize a sparrow walk. But we lack any significant effort to save these birds.
If 10 years of World Sparrow Day celebrations has achieved something, it's the awareness and acceptance that House Sparrows are soon going to be extinct, what else!
We need to spread public awareness to take some concrete measures to save not only one species of birds but the whole Nature. For this specific species, it has actually come to a point to put only conservation efforts. While public awareness is required for everything else that we still have as Nature's gift... Can humans save it?