Danger! Sparrows!

Few birds are happier in the company of man than the house sparrow, and for much of the year it is rare to find them far from human habitations. Sparrows are very adaptable, they have been found living and breeding 2000ft underground in a coalmine; and others have been recorded living their whole lives inside warehouses. They have even swam under water in some instances to escape predators. They are quick to learn new feeding habits, soon adapting to taking food from suspended nut feeders, a habit first noted in the late 1960s. They are very sociable birds, often nesting in colonies, and most pairs will try and raise at least two and often three broods a year. But The population of sparrows has been declining, as there is... continued below

Male House Sparrow on the guard for predators. They will sound a call for the others if one is spotted. Visit Fowl Play for more bird art, photography and stories.

Male House Sparrow

ess food for them, because of fewer gardens. They are now on the threatened birds’ list in many parts of the world. Possible explanations for the decline include modern agricultural practices that leave less waste grain in the fields as well as the increased use of pesticides in urban gardens. While the oldest living age of a sparrow is recorded at over 13 years old, the survival rate for the young of each year is less than 25%. Over 40% of all adult House Sparrows die each year. The sparrows are a very spunky and hardy bird that many of which live a hard wild life. There are many dangers to the sparrow from predators like cats and hawks to poisons and now even cell phone towers pose a serious degradation to the sparrow population.
“ Bio conservation activists and experts have given a call for providing space and facilities for inviting sparrows back into human habitations so that the most ‘human-friendly’ bird will not face threat of extinction. Being classified as a general bird, sparrow doesn’t fall in the list of wildlife birds as it is not sighted much in forests....” from http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-andhrapradesh/cellphone-towers-posing-threat-to-survival-of-sparrows/article4531912.ece continued....“A little space has to be provided in the midst of our concrete houses. Otherwise, the sparrows will slowly disappear,” said B. Anusha, president of the Bio-Conservation Foundation (BCF). She made an appeal for providing open water pots in the premises of houses and buildings to attract sparrows. Big trees and food grains should be made available. Wooden boxes have to be provided for the convenience of these small birds.

The extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow was caused by habitat loss. “from wiki” The largest source of human-related bird death is due to glass windows, which kill 100–900 million birds a year. The next largest sources of human-caused death are hunting (100+ million), house cats (100 million), cars and trucks (50 to 100 million), electric power lines (174 million), and pesticides (67 million).[16] Birds are also killed in large quantities by flying into communication tower guidelines, usually after being attracted by tower lights. This phenomenon is called towerkill and is responsible for 5–50 million birds deaths a year. And : in 2015, biologists working for the state of California estimated that 3,500 birds died a single solar plant in the span of a year, "many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

---

Male house sparrow talking to a morning dove.

I cant' imagine a world without sparrows, yet the world is without certain ones already. Even with 150 million sparrows estimated in the United States alone, is the loss of one bird acceptable? Does the more humans that are alive mean that each one life is worth less living? Is the sparrow not important because there are many and they are so familiar? What is important to us, to continue blindly unaware of our actions on the lives of sparrows and other animals, or to become aware and adapt. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, one famous quote says. I feel we should all try to be more reasonable.

Rybird