Citizen Sparrow

For years, we have been lamenting the decline of the House Sparrow in India. Surprisingly, given all this concern, there is hardly any systematic information on the population of this species today, and in comparison to the past. The Citizen Sparrow project was an attempt to generate this kind of information.

In April-June 2012, a questionnaire survey on House Sparrows in India was conducted by the Bombay Natural History Society, the National Centre for Biological Sciences, and the Nature Conservation Foundation, together with a large number of supporting organizations. This project gathered over 10,000 reports from more than 5,000 respondents. These reports, taken together, suggest a decline in sparrows all across the country, although their current status varies considerably from city to city and region to region. The most striking result was that reports of sparrows were consistently lower from cities than from towns and villages. This is the first large dataset on sparrow reports from across the country.

More information about the project, and the results, is on the Citizen Sparrow website.