House Sparrow

The Indian House Sparrow (Passer Domesticus Indicus) belongs to the Passeridae family and is common in urban areas and human settlements. They are small passerines with short and heavy bills and strong legs, who hop to move about on the ground. They do not possess a true song and instead communicate with chirps. The female is dull and pale in comparison to the male. 

This bird, which is the most common avian in India, is known as Adaikalang Kuruvi in Tamil. Its size is the same as the Bulbul.

Male of species

The plumage of the House Sparrow is mostly different shades of grey and brown. The female is mostly buff above and below, while the male has boldly coloured head markings, a reddish back, and grey underparts. The male also has a dark grey crown from the top of its bill to its back, and chestnut brown flanking its crown on the sides of its head. The female has no black markings or grey crown. Its upperparts and head are brown with darker streaks around the mantle and a distinct pale supercilium. Its underparts are pale grey-brown. The female's bill is brownish-grey, and becomes darker in breeding plumage, approaching the black of the male's bill. 

Male House Sparrow

This bird is very social. It is gregarious at all seasons when feeding, often forming flocks with other types of bird. It roosts communally, and its nests are usually grouped together in clumps, and it engages in social activities such as dust and water bathing, and "social singing", in which birds call together in bushes. 

Birds taking a communal bath

Nesting season lasts practically throughout the year. With the most favoured months varying with locality. Its nest is a collection of straw, rubbish and feathers in a hole in ceiling, niche in a wall, an inverted lamp shade—and every conceivable site, within or without any occupied building. Its clutch usually ranges from 3 to 5 eggs, that are pale greenish white stippled and blotched with brown. Several successive broods are often raised. 

Large clutch of 7 eggs

The House Sparrow is monogamous with both the male and female helping in nesting activities, which are normally found in small crevices of traditional Indian homes, ground, banks and sometimes in trees. 

Female with different markings feeding young

The House Sparrow is believed to have been closely associated with people for around 10,000 years. This bird is inseparable from human habitations. It is a confirmed hanger-on with man, in hills and plains alike, whether in a bustling noisy city or outlying forest hamlet.

It is an omnivore and its food is comprised of; grain, insects, fruit buds, flower nectar and kitchen scraps. This bird sometimes collects in enormous flocks and does damage to ripening crops and in market gardens. In common with many other birds, the House Sparrow requires grit to digest the hard seeds it eats. Grit can be either stone, often grains of masonry, or the shells of eggs or snails; oblong and rough grains are preferred. 

Juvenile with pink bill and nestling gape—the soft, swollen base becomes harder and less swollen as the bird matures

Below is an eloquent narrative on the House Sparrow by Baljit Singh which originally appeared at this link here. 

The House Sparrow 

“A bit of cereal, the right kind of garden hedge or even just a nesting box are all that it will take to protect a bird that lives alongside humans but is fast disappearing. 

In the midst of much informed and universal concern about the future of the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), one of man’s oldest living commensals, there is a ray of hope yet. For, returning home on the first sun-drenched mid-morning of January 2013, I experienced the heart-stopping moment of seeing 23 house sparrows, basking in the warmth of the sun! Given a conducive habitat, all other side effects of modern day life-styles notwithstanding, the house sparrow should be the last of all to wander off the living planet. 

The house sparrow is a sober-looking bird with a ubiquitous spread — from Leh in the North to Cape Comorin in the South and from the Somnath Temple in the West to the Camorta Island in the East. With that kind of a presence, we should be able to spot them anywhere. Ornithologist Salim Ali had labelled them as “man’s hanger-on” for they are known to enter homes nonchalantly, chattering non-stop as they set about arranging their personal living comfort by adding heaps of straw to any potential nest-site, quite unmindful of the householder’s presence. 

New lifestyles to blame 

But today, most Indians would perhaps know this bird only through photographs. Not even two out of 10 may be able to lay claim to having seen the bird in the outdoors. So why do so few of us encounter the bird despite its worldwide spread? As the bird lives only among humans, it’s not about disappearing forests, but about the pollution around us, including from communication towers, the use of steel and glass in our buildings that has reduced the availability of nesting sites and food, and, where there are gardens, the partiality for exotic rather than indigenous vegetation. 

This shift to new lifestyles, even in rural communities, is at severe conflict with the house sparrow’s basic existential needs. In China, the house sparrow was exterminated by about the end of the 1960s after being declared the number one crop pest. On the other hand, that very “pest number one” became the angel of progress in America and Australia where it was not native but consciously introduced for pest control in agriculture, to cut down the reliance on chemical alternatives. With time, the house sparrow came to be equivocally feted in both continents. Today, the bird figures high in their avian literature and is much cherished. 

Coming back to the large number of resident house sparrows at our home in Chandigarh, there are two contributing factors. One is that my wife has always spread abundant food on the rooftop, every morning. Coupled with that is the availability of secure roosting and nesting niches by way of thick, tall hedges on two sides of the house. Of course, there is natural predation of fledglings by crows and by an odd Shikra (a hawk sub-species) but the house sparrow is a sturdy breeder raising three broods of two to five chicks, thrice each year. So the population does not merely “hold” at the optimum survival figure for the given area at our home but also feeds the neighbourhood. As simple as that! 

No description of the bird will be complete without a mention of the strong streak of tenacity in its character. And here I can do no better than quote the master, Edward Hamilton Aitken (born in Satara, Maharashtra, in the mid-19th century to Scottish parents) from his book “Common Birds of Bombay” (1900): “And when a Sparrow makes up its mind nothing will unmake it except the annihilation of that Sparrow. Its faithful spouse is always, and very strongly, of the same mind. So they set to work to make a hole in the corner of the ceiling-cloth and they tear and tug with an energy which leaves no room for failure. Then they begin to fetch hay and the quantities which a couple will carry in a day is miraculous…. I declare solemnly that you might have fed a horse on the hay which I removed daily as most of it tumbled down….” 

Much like most bird species the house sparrow is highly adaptable. Even though its traditional wilderness has been usurped and its living niche inside man’s once mud-and-thatch dwelling replaced with glass and concrete, the house sparrow could well be the last on this living-planet if mankind were to spare just one hundredth of its cereal intake for the bird and make space for it around homes, where possible by planting indigenous hedges, and if there is no garden, by simply providing a nesting box. That’s not too much to ask.” 

[Baljit Singh]

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There seem to be an equal number of friends and foes to the House Sparrow. Some see the birds' value in ecology as a natural answer to pest reduction, and others, more so in the Western World, view them as pests to be eliminated. For those "friends" to the House Sparrow, here is a nice link about how to purchase and order small, inexpensive homes for the House Sparrow.