No twigs for sparrows in the City

No twigs for sparrows in the City

Vijay Times

A sparrow took a slice of twig and thought it very nice; I think because his empty plate was handed nature twice; invigorated, waded in all the deepest sky; until his little figure was forfeited away.

Bangalore: It may well be Bangaloreans 'forfeiting away' the sparrow in this 1955 poem by Emily Dickinson.

The sparrow’s abode in the City has been laid on the altar. So say environmentalists and bird-watchers who blame rapid construction activity in the City over the past two decades for the little harmless bird being on the “verge of extinction” here.

The sparrow population in the City has gone down significantly -- a sad trend which bird-watchers say is credited to mass urbanisation and rising pollution levels.

Manjunath P, a bird watcher and secretary of Green Cross, an NGO conducting bird surveys in the city every year, says sparrows are extremely sensitive to pollution and its dwindling stock sends strong warning signals on the increasingly impure air we breathe everyday.
Bangalore had sparrows in abundance in the 1960s and 1970s but the decline began in the early and mid-1980s when the City took on the hew of a burgeoning software centre attracting investment and increased construction activity says Manjunath.

“Houses with 'Mangalore tiles' with their wooden bars were ideally suited for sparrows to build their nests, but over the years these types of houses (which were common till 1970s) have given way to huge buildings with flat terraces.” Today, sparrows have been wiped out barring few areas like Seshadripuram, Vasanthnagar, Malleshwaram and Fraser Town among few other areas where such structures still exist.