Spurred by Sparrow

11 September 2020

When you are in the class of ‘birder’ that I am, you would have been quite dismayed to see the disappearance of the sparrow, the one small bird near you which you could identify, whose dewy drop eyes and chirpy nature conjured for you a sliver of sylvan spring, of hope and that too at very close quarters. Sparrows have been known as one of those birds who dissociated with the wild and associated with human settlement by choice. We do see ducks, geese and hen otherwise and then there is the turkey which are called farm animals. These we ‘tame’ or ‘grow’ to feed ourselves with eggs and their meat, and of course, for sport in many parts of India and specifically in the south, there is a ‘bloodsport’ pitting cocks in a ring against each other! But sparrow is unlike that category, it remains ‘wild’ or shall we say ‘feral’ quite like peacocks are, but unlike peacock, the sparrow sort of craves the human’s presence. It is almost as if the sparrow depended on us in a process of evolution, by adapting to digest grain and gram, stuff that human agriculture made possible to harvest and hoard for better days, and which in process of handling or storage allows the sparrow to help themselves with!

I know the fun one has when early morning you wake up to their chirp, to watch them take off as small sisterhoods toward the sun at dawn, to see them get together around you, and take those scatterings that you offer as some act of ‘penitence or generosity’, depending upon your conscience. The drowsy hang of a thatched roof, the walls with gouged spaces to hold lamps which would be lit once a year around the festival of lights, niches and grooves on timber lofts and open barns where the cattle sheltered in the backyard, these were invariable the places where the sparrows would be found, as they hovered and hopped about. The sparrow is a very domesticated ‘House Bound’ creature in the sense that invariably if one nesting spot was made, every season you would find nesting happening right there.

So naturally there was lore associated, songs and stories to be told about them. Unlike the Americas and Australia where the White Man introduced them and they were enterprising to hunt blue birds and other native ‘cavity nesters’ as per researchers, the Indian Sparrow has no such history of maiming or killing other sister bird species. In Indian traditions that are so copious in their references to the centrality of food, as grain and gram, with lentils and millets too being central in most Indian palates, the sparrows could not have asked for better environment. However, they would retain their ‘wild’ness in that I never noticed the sparrow come to compete with crows for cooked rice that was offered as ancestral offerings every morning. For them it was always raw rice grain, wheat and horse gram. The greatest gift the sparrow could have asked it when national poet Subramanya Bharati (11 September is his Death Anniversary) chose to sing about them in the context of ‘freedom’, https://lmexpressions.com/2017/02/21/bharathiyar-poems-little-sparrow/asking us Indians to aspire to their degree of freedom, asking us to be like the sparrows in a free state of being! I can also say that subsequently many poets wrote of ‘Cittu Kuruvi’ as Bharati had embellished the sparrow as a term of endearment when they wanted to woo maidens in their traps weaved of magical words…

So around the time India got her second freedom in the form of Economic Liberalisation, when government ran schemes to pave roads in rural areas, to convert rural housing into urban style concrete constructions and to pave the streets and pavements, erect mobile towers and lay OFC cables, the dear sparrow started to beat a retreat. A generation has now grown up in India that does not know the pleasure of walking through slush, through mud tracks and unpaved paths in the monsoons, when the clay could fashion a high heel sticking to your sandals or when your entire back side would be a shooting gallery target paper figure, pockmarked with the impressions and residue of the path that you had trudged. We have a Urban Renewal Mission first named after Jawaharlal Nehru(JNNURM) and now after Atal Vajpayee (AMRUT) http://banking.mercenie.com/national/amrut-scheme-replace-jnnurm/which are euphemism to corporations paving every imaginable street side or corners and depriving cities of bare soil, which is a major reason for water logging in our cities. More importantly perhaps it is the single biggest contribution to sparrows not finding mud baths for their use. There are other theories too that compact construction using concrete does not allow perches for nesting, that mobile towers dazed our little winged companions, may be our use of artificially synthesised pesticides for worms and and rodenticides created an environment where they could not feed as previously? May be too many electrical transmission lines when the national rapidly marched toward electrification or was it the grids of cable TV transmission lines that made our cities look like webbed domes, obstructing the flight path of the sparrows? The net result was I stopped noticing the sparrows. I thought I was alone initially, may be they had changed colour, may be they had gotten fatter that I mistook them for warblers?

Then it became a research subject, it was confirmed when researchers came up with alarming conclusion that the dainty little brown bundle of joy was indeed missing! So they placed it on some Red List for Conservation and the Bombay Natural History Society accepted that the sparrow was indeed endangered. They sent a proposal to the Government to set up a Project Sparrow, like Project Tiger, Project Elephant, Project Gaur ( Wild Bison) and so on. India had a Mr Sparrow in Mohammed Dilawar ( Time Hero of Environment 2008) who started a ‘Box Initiative’ where he and his volunteers set up small wooden boxes on trees as perches for nesting for sparrows along with grain and water dispensers. Now many people that enterprisingly developed models of such feeders for sparrows where the birds learn quickly to use the water on top and the extract grain or gram from the bottom. From the alarming low of the first decade, when I thought I would not see the sparrow in my life time any more, I was surprised and relieved to see them again about a year ago. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1607296 In this time, lot of research has gone into the habitat of the sparrow which includes traditional agricultural practices and animal husbandry and of course housing and paving that once made sparrows so much part of our human ecosystem!https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49290191_The_case_of_the_Disappearing_House_Sparrow_Passer_domesticus_indicus

Today when Grandfather Green Sir David Attenborough has warned us that we have moved from the age of Halocene to the Anthropocene ( His brief iconic style acceptance speech at Davos 2019https://www.livescience.com/64570-attenborough-warns-earth-entered-anthropocene.html) ornithologists inform us that the sparrows and humans formed this association at the dawn of the Halocene age. So if we need a visible goal in front of us, it is this, that we need to keep sparrows visible and ubiquitous to us humans, and not on some critical list. As long as sparrows remain with us, we can extend this Halocene perhaps and avoid the cataclysmic Anthropocene. Remember that this Halocene is definitely the very age in which ‘modern human’ successfully jostling other homo competitors or collaborators, arrived as a one intelligent and networking species seeking planetary dominance. With the sparrow as our ‘lucky’ mascot we have travelled to the Moon and Mars in our thirst for development and knowledge and the sparrow is reminding us that even as advanced humans with abundant technology at our disposal, we remain dependent on Mother Nature. If our constant companions thus far- the sparrows disappear, then our turn to disappear will come next!

So let us redefine the meaning of urbanity with civilisational values and not commercial ones. Let us allow the dirt which paved the way for mass agriculture and food surpluses that founded our civilisational epoch to not get wiped out, to ground ourselves and our feet literally on the dirt upon our soils. Let the word ‘soiled’ not convey a sense of poverty or ugliness but a sense of rootedness! Let us not seal ourselves completely off in such a way that our sparrows cannot cohabit with us. Instead of marking mobile call drop zones with more powerful radiating towers, let us find other ways to circumvent them, even a pre warned ‘call termination and auto reconnect on our phones! We need to reduce the heat we are generating, the carbon di Oxide that we are spewing, because Climate Change is for real. The closest connect to its true situation is with the sparrow. Just changing the cabling to underground and to offering TV through Dish Antennae has allowed room for the sparrow to reappear. Of course, they are right now rare sightings. But if we keep adapting to their needs, the rare can convert to random and the random can convert to ubiquitous!

‘Life will find a way’ is what most humans keep reassuring ourselves when we are in a difficult situation or peril. It is not as if no effort is involved in that process, is it? From plague to pandemic, has not human life found so many ways to preserve themselves. Now the very planet through the sparrow is sending us a signal, through its disappearance and its sparing reappearance within the decade, that if we set ourselves to it, we can do sufficient to allow humans to continue living on this wonderful Planet Earth. Or else Life can still find a way…we too can fall waysides like other hominids have before us, some who were with us, as cousins and contingents enroute this journey on Earth as a dominant species!