World Sparrow Day
Earlier this year, a group of naturalists at Salem Ornithological Foundation tracked the sparrow, but with laptops instead of binoculars. On eBird, an online database of all sightings across India, the team trawled for entries on the common house sparrow — whose diminishing population around urban India has been a point of alarm for over a decade.
The team looked at sparrow sightings across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and mapped them out district by district. Chennai district, for instance, has seen sparrow sightings in almost every three-kilometre stretch over the past 10 years. All these maps were put together, along with an interactive map of the entire State, in a final report that confidently declares that Tamil Nadu’s sparrow population is now stable.
