To my wild Guru from the Urban world

House Sparrow – The friendly bird which has helped most of the children to grow up, teaching them morals through small stories, assisting them to eat their food, and of course playing with them. I was no different; I not only grew up with the friendly neighborhood sparrows, but also share a special bond with them.

My childhood days were spent in an old building called as a Wada. There were at least 50 sparrows inhabiting it along with us humans. There was an old Gujarati lady who took upon the task of feeding these birds with grain every day.  The building with mud based wall nearly of 2 ft wide and wooden beams provided plenty of spaces for the sparrows to make nests.

As a little boy I caught a fancy to these birds. Watching them patiently for hours on end through the window of my house, of course on days when we had no school.  The birds would welcome every sunrise with a very chirpy song, and begin their day by starting to look out for a meal. Waking up to the chirping of sparrows became a habit.

As a child I used to be engrossed watching them for hours, seeing them take a bath both in water and soft mud.  I also realised how the birds could be choosy about the grain to eat, also their preference to a cockroach over a grain of rice. I never could understand then why some sparrows sometimes preferred to eat grains of sand to rice. I used to think that like in we humans, there were some fools in sparrows as well. Sometimes a group of sparrows would unite and beat and chase a particular individual of their community.  Probably this was their way to punish a wrong doer in their community, I thought.

Sparrows were quite clumsy when it came to nest building. They simply used to keep adding to material to the same nest year after year. The nest used to get bigger that the support on which it was built and parts of the net would fall off as a result.  Some times to my disgust I would find eggs and young featherless chicks fall of the nest.  I used to try to try to put them back in the nest which was too high for my reach. On not being successful which those attempts tried to raise them, trying to make them comfortable on cosy cotton bed, only to find them dead the next morning. Upset at myself the next time I found such a chick I decided not to touch it and let have Mother Nature take her own course.   

Once I heard a din raised by the sparrows, I quickly ran out to the balcony to see what was happening the sparrows were fluttering their wings sitting up on a wire or any other safe perch and chirping differently, and then, I saw a feral cat passing by.  I found that the sparrows would make a particular din when they saw a cat and this was always true. That gave me a new game “Spot the Cat” whenever I heard that particular call from the sparrows.  The same game is still played only the sparrows are Langoors and the cat is a Tiger or a Leopard!

Quickly the child hood went by and today, after travelling over many forests in India I sit back and think that indeed I am indebted to the sparrows who taught me an lot on wild life behavior.  Rampant urbanization has now threatened the very existence of sparrows, a bird which has taught itself to coexist with the human beings. 

Lets to our best to help this common bird from not facing the ignomity of extinction from the fringes of our households.