Sparrow Saga in Sikkim & the Citizen Sparrow Initiative

USHA LACHUNGPA

Sparrows or ‘Bhangera’ are bold birds. They actually seem to prefer human company! An integral part of my childhood in Mumbai, they would invariably nest on our living room tube light, shedding bits of dried grasses on the ground below and occasionally fly into the ceiling fan when it was on, much to our distress. Closing the windows was not much of an option. They’d simply wait till we opened them to let in some breeze. The loft above the kitchen was another favoured nesting site. All my Maharashtrian neighbours’s kids grew up on ‘Kau-Chiu’ (Crow-Sparrow) stories while being fed by doting mothers and grandmothers. So ubiquitous, somehow we never thought of sparrows as wild birds. Indeed House Sparrows are called Passer domesticus!
We moved to Sikkim at the end of 1985 with the lofty intention of raising a family at high altitude. I had spent a good part of adolescence and college days as a Bombay Natural History Society or BNHS member, which included a fair bit of bird-watching. The only copy of ‘Birds of Sikkim’ I saw (surprisingly a Sikkim Forest Department publication), by famed Indian ornithologist Dr. Salim Ali an important BNHS family member, was with Ms. Ritchie, Principal of Paljor Namgyal Girls’ School, when she called me to have a look at a strange bird lying dead in her compound. It was a Chestnut-winged Cuckoo, a ‘lifer’ for me. Though properly skinned and deposited in the Deer Park Museum at Tashiling Secretariat it disintegrated along with all the other stuffed specimens, over several wet weather years. The book however was resurrected due to the timely intervention of the Sikkim Nature Conservation Foundation kind courtesy of Mr. K. C. Pradhan and Late Mr. Tashi Topden.
Sparrows are a type of Finch, birds with short stubby beaks or bills meant mainly for cracking hard grains and seeds. They are (or were) about as common as crows and pigeons and usually we club them together when talking of ‘common’ birds. Strangely during his survey, Dr. Salim Ali did not observe any House Sparrows in Sikkim back in 1958-59. He found though that the Eurasian Tree Sparrow Passer montanus was a common resident. He also did not come across a third Sparrow the Cinnamon Tree Sparrow or Russet Sparrow Passer rutilans. I was hence taken aback when on a routine wildlife survey, 30 years later in around 1988, I came across scores of House Sparrows in the bustling township of Melli Bazar in South Sikkim. Many were nesting. One day, in 1990, while walking on Gangtok’s New Market or MG Road, I saw one pair, just one pair of House Sparrows, on the verandah above Panorama, a photo studio and shop owned by my husband’s school buddy Babulal. Perhaps someone had brought a caged pair and they had escaped from captivity? It was just a hunch.
A few years later, we were having a Green Circle meeting on the top floor of Chumbi Residency, where the verandah overlooks the doctors’ quarters above the STNM Hospital, a stone's throw from MG Road. It was evening and the trees down there were filling up with sparrows. A closer look revealed that among the scores of Eurasian Trees Sparrows with characteristic black beauty-spots on their cheeks, there were a few House Sparrows, comfortably ‘at home’ with their cousins, the dapper males strikingly standing out in sharp contrast to their duller mates. No binoculars needed to confirm! And I wondered if they were interbreeding!
In 2003 I wrote an article in the local papers about sparrows roosting in the lone ‘Dhupi’ tree outside the STNM Hospital OPD, called the ‘Singing Tree’ to draw attention to this little bird we take for granted as much as it does us! (Technically, roosting calls are not songs, but I rather liked the attractive title of my article!) An edited extract:
2 February 2003: Singing Tree: It was uncanny, but the Out Patients Department of our government hospital STNM, Gangtok, seemed immune to the magic of birdsong on its doorstep. The steady streams of vehicles, the piercing whistles of the traffic policeman, the chatting of passers-by……..hardly anyone paid heed to the cheery chirping of scores of tree sparrows as they prepared to roost for the evening in the lone ‘Dhupi’ tree. Apparently they too were unaware that all hospital areas should be ‘Silence Zones’!
Almost every urban area has several such ‘singing trees’. I looked up the trunk of this particularly lonely tree and showed my children what none seemed to notice. In the darkness of the foliage, tiny fluffy brown bodies dotted every thin branch. The whole tree was alive with these invisible bundles of energy. It was around 4.00pm and going to be dark in a while, but as we watched more and more of these little birds dived into its shelter. Not one could be seen outside the tight foliage of this exotic tree. Like perfume, the tree was exuding all this song! And no one was listening. It was amazing that none of the human traffic underneath so much as even noticed all that cheerful commotion over their heads as they passed beneath. How immune one gets!
Over this last decade people began noticing a decline in sparrow populations in many parts of the world. Was it due to some infection? Pesticides perhaps? Or global warming, changing climates? There were some theories. Mobile Tower radiation? People began worrying about a bird they had never bothered about before. We now actually have a World Sparrow Day on 20 March!
CITIZEN SPARROW 01 April-31 May 2012: Recently this two-month initiative was launched by BNHS and other conservation organizations in India such as Nature Conservation Foundation, National Centre for Biological Sciences and the Environment Ministry of the Government of India to document information on declining populations of House Sparrows at www.citizensparrow.in. There is also a Facebook page to rope in as many people as possible. We in Sikkim also joined in.
6 April 2012: That afternoon, as I left the Emergency Room of the STNM Hospital after my 3rd shot of Rabies vaccine, I saw this male House Sparrow alight before a parked vehicle. As I fumbled in my bag for my camera, it hopped under the front bumper and brought down what looked like a winged termite. Luckily I could take a couple of quick photos before it flew off. Nearby perched on the air-conditioner box were some Eurasian Tree Sparrows chirping away. Good to see that my joint group of House and Tree Sparrows still live amicably at STNM Hospital complex!! I could not stay longer as it started raining and people began staring!!
These days, on the MG Promenade, we can see some House Sparrows fearlessly darting among the tourists seated on benches, pecking at tidbits. In the Forest Colony at Balwakhani, about a km from MG Road, we also have Russet Sparrows. Ali Hussain, renowned Mirshikar Bird Trapper of BNHS fame had helped me trap some in BNHS mist nets in the Himalayan Zoological Park at Bulbuley and we ringed them around 1996. That makes it three Sparrow species just in Gangtok itself! Recently during our morning walk, we saw a House Sparrow pair at the VIP Colony gate above Gangtok at around 2000m altitude; Range Forest Officer Mr. Ongden Lepcha wrote about sparrows declining during last year’s World Sparrow Day; Teacher Mr. Niraj Thapa photographed House Sparrow feeding chicks at Tashi Namgyal Sr. Secondary School complex; Forester Mr. Karma Zimpa photographed Tree Sparrows at Forest Colony; Assistant Professor Dr. Bhoj Kr. Acharya recorded House Sparrows at Lingee-Payong,.... the numbers are few, but can we say that they are perhaps moving a bit higher every year? It would be interesting to find out.
So do we conclude Sparrows are safe in Sikkim? Are they fleeing the pesticide and mobile tower filled plains and moving uphill to the sanctuary that organic Sikkim offers? If so, it is good news for us as they would rid our neighbourhood of pests while pollinating our plants; but are they being displaced by the aggressive ‘Roopie’ or the Common Myna? We need young researchers to take this up as a serious study and prove or disprove our assumptions.
Meanwhile all’s not well in our Forest Colony. We miss the din created by a large flock of Tree Sparrows which used to fearlessly nest under our roof and nearby Camellia Trees along with Green-backed Tits (Chichinkotey) and Blue Whistling Thrushes (Kalchura). A growing army of domestic cats breeding unchecked, many now stray and feral, patrol the neighbourhood ensuring that they will never return. Gone is our privilege of having wild creatures nesting confidently within arm’s reach. Food for thought…
[The writer is Principal Research Officer with the Forest Department, Govt of Sikkim]