As house sparrows vanish, how people across cities fight to bring them back

Today, in city after city, the humble house sparrow is vanishing. Their sound has ebbed away, replaced by the constant whoosh of traffic and the mechanical whir of air-conditioners. The absence of their chirrup tells a larger ecological story of vanishing habitats, poisoned food chains, and technological interventions that have unsettled something as basic as a bird’s instinct to nest.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research has tracked declines as steep as 88 percent in Andhra Pradesh. Kerala, Gujarat, and Rajasthan report 20 percent drops, and coastal belts register losses of 70 to 80 percent. Surveys in Dehradun count an average of 84 sparrows in the suburban edges, but the number plummets to just 12 to 43 in the city’s concrete heart.

Across urban India — Bengaluru, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai — the refrain is the same: the bird that once lived in the rafters of every house is retreating. These figures reflect global patterns. In Western Europe, sparrows fell by nearly sixty percent between 2000 and 2021; in Great Britain, their number declined by 68 percent overall and up to 90 percent in some regions. The story of the sparrow is, in fact, the story of our changing world.

The culprits are many, often working together in quiet, devastating synergy. Old-style houses with tiled roofs and wooden beams have given way to sleek glass-fronted towers, sealed windows, and false ceilings, leaving no space for sparrows to tuck away their nests. Pesticides and the decline of kitchen gardens have robbed them of insect prey essential to their chicks’ survival. Mobile phone towers, a defining feature of the 21st -century skyline, are suspected of disrupting breeding and navigation — studies in Spain and Indian cities like Bhopal and Nagpur point to their possible role in reproductive failure.

And even in survival, sparrows are now outcompeted by pigeons and mynas, both far more adaptable to hard-edged urban ecologies. The result is not just a disappearing bird, but an eroding ecological balance. Sparrows are pollinators, insect regulators, and bio-indicators. Their decline has led to larger disruptions in soil, air, and water that ultimately shape human health.

Against this backdrop of loss stands a man in Hyderabad (Telangana) with a resolve and an improbable mission. For M.A. Razak, sparrows are not just birds, they are the measure of his heart. A retired postmaster and resident of Prashanthi Hills Colony in Meerpet, on the outskirts of Hyderabad, Razak has devoted the last 15 years to the protection of house sparrows. Step into his modest home, and you’ll find bird nests tucked into every corner, tiny sanctuaries that play host to sparrows, mynas, parakeets, white-throated munias, owls, bulbuls, pigeons, and even black drongos. Each morning, he scatters millet for his winged guests and listens, entranced, to the symphony of their chirping. “Their voices fill me with peace,” he tells The Federal, his eyes softening. 

Also read: How online gambling ruined lives of young men in Maharashtra’s Solapur and Beed

Razak’s journey as a sparrow guardian began in 2008. At the time, he was serving as sub-postmaster in Marchala village, Mahbubnagar district. Every day, he watched a sparrow struggle to weave a nest inside a small hole in the post office wall. The grass stalks it carried kept slipping out, unable to hold. A sweeper pointed this out to Razak, who then placed a small earthen pot on the wall. The sparrow pair promptly made it their home and raised their chicks there. The daily chorus of chirps filled the post office with cheer — and Razak, deeply moved, decided he would dedicate his life to helping sparrows build their homes. That simple act of compassion sowed the seed for a lifelong mission.

Since then, Razak has distributed over 4,000 sparrow nests, specially crafted in clay, to bird lovers across Hyderabad, free of charge. With the city losing its natural nesting spots and twigs, Razak’s clay nests have become surrogate homes for sparrows. Even after his retirement, he has continued this mission, spending his pension on nest-making and distribution. For fifteen years now, he has remained the sparrow’s steadfast custodian. 

Razak, who has three children — all settled in government service as teachers — often says his real children are the sparrows. He spends his pension not on personal indulgence but on feeding and housing them. At his home in Meerpet, water bowls are always full, and millets are scattered generously. At dawn, sparrows chatter outside his bedroom window, their calls serving as his natural alarm clock. “They wake me with their chirping,” he laughs, “and I cannot imagine a day without them.”

In 2014, Razak’s work caught wider attention when he attended a bird lovers’ meet at Hyderabad Zoo. He soon became a member of the Zoo’s Nest Team, distributing thousands of clay nests across colonies like Nandi Hills, Seven Hills, Prashanthi Hills, Karmanghat, Badangpet, and Almasguda. “I make these nests with my pension money and also with the help of donors,” he says. His work has been so inspiring that Annapurna Studios recently filmed a documentary on his life and mission.

Also read: How ‘unfair pricing’ of leaves is brewing a storm in Assam’s small tea gardens

Razak can often be seen cycling through the lanes of Hyderabad colonies, carrying clay nests and a small ladder on his two-wheeler. Whenever he spots a sparrow, he installs a nest nearby, ensuring the birds have a safe home. He distributes the nests as gifts to residents, urging them to place them in balconies, verandahs, and courtyards. For Razak, building nests for homeless sparrows in a concrete jungle is not just a hobby, it is his life’s purpose. “If you give them a nest, they will breed, and their numbers will rise again,” he explains.

Every year, on March 20 — World Sparrow Day — Razak organises awareness campaigns. He visits schools, encouraging children to pledge their support for sparrow conservation. For him, saving sparrows is inseparable from saving the environment itself. “These birds eat the insects that destroy plants, they prevent disease, they balance our ecosystem. If we let them live, they will let us live,” he says with conviction.

Those who wish to raise sparrows can call him for a free clay nest. Razak also distributes wooden nests made by the Rajendranagar Agricultural University, which manufactures them from leftover plywood sheets. His aim is simple: to ensure no sparrow is homeless in Hyderabad.

“I have been working for sparrow conservation for 15 years now,” Razak reflects. “My happiness lies in giving them a home. My life’s goal is to see sparrows survive, not vanish.” For this retired postmaster, sparrow conservation is not just an act of service, it is the very meaning of his life. In a city that has forgotten how to listen to birdsong, Razak’s house stands as proof that even one man’s devotion can make a big difference.

If Razak’s story is one of modest, individual devotion, in Delhi, Rakesh Khatri, known as ‘India’s Nest Man’ Khatri, began his journey with the Eco-Roots Foundation in 2012, and since then has built over 7,30,000 nests for house sparrows and other birds. He has also conducted about 3,500 workshops, has taught millions of children and adults to build birdhouses using natural materials like coconut fibre, jute, and bamboo. The numbers tell their own story, but the effect lies elsewhere: in the spreading of a consciousness. His work has touched cities from Delhi to Raipur, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, and Bangalore, creating not just nests but networks of citizens who look up at balconies and eaves differently, as potential sanctuaries rather than neutral structures.

The movement has institutional anchors, too. The Nature Forever Society, founded in 2005 by Mohammed Dilawar, has been instrumental in raising awareness. It declared the sparrow Delhi’s state bird, initiated Project SOS that distributed 52,000 bird feeders — a feat that found its way into the Guinness World Records — and launched the Common Bird Monitoring of India programme, one of the few large-scale citizen science projects dedicated to urban avian life. Since 2010, the Society has also championed World Sparrow Day, which has now become a rallying point for conservationists worldwide. What began as a modest campaign is today a global calendar event, linking the fate of a little brown bird in India with that of its cousins in Europe and Africa.

At Haryana’s Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre, better known for its work with vultures, scientists have also turned their attention to sparrows. Working alongside the Bombay Natural History Society and the state forest department, the centre is trying to understand how altered landscapes affect sparrow behaviour. These scientific studies complement grassroots efforts, creating a fuller picture of a species under stress.

Also read: Eviction drives in Assam’s Golaghat leave migrant Muslim families pushed to a corner

The story of the sparrow is not just one of nostalgia or grassroots activism, but also of cutting-edge science. In June this year, an Indian team of researchers from Manipal University Jaipur, Banaras Hindu University, the Zoological Survey of India, Kolkata and other leading institutions sequenced the entire genome of the house sparrow for the first time. Published in the journals Giga Byte and Giga Science, the reference genome identifies over 24,000 genes and offers insights into traits linked to immune response, circadian rhythms, and oxygen transport.

These findings open up powerful possibilities. With a genomic map in hand, scientists can track how sparrows adapt — or fail to adapt — to rapidly changing environments. Conservation can thus move from anecdotal rescue to targeted strategies, informed by deep biological understanding. For a bird that has often been dismissed as too ordinary to matter, the achievement of a complete genome feels like an overdue tribute.

What holds all these threads together — Razak’s clay nests, Khatri’s workshops, Dilawar’s global campaigns, the genome labs — is a larger truth: the sparrow’s decline is our own story, written in feathers and silence. Their disappearance is a symptom of modernity’s contradictions — our hunger for speed, concrete, connectivity — set against our fragile dependence on balance, shade, and small cycles of life. Sparrows vanish because our homes are no longer theirs, our gardens no longer insect-rich, our skylines too cluttered with signals they cannot decode.

And yet, where there is loss, there is also resistance. Schoolchildren build birdhouses in eco-workshops, learning that conservation is not the work of distant experts but of their own hands. In Hyderabad, citizens hang Razak’s clay pots on balconies, and in return, are greeted with the joyous racket of a new brood. Every March, hashtags for World Sparrow Day trend on social media. In a curious reversal, the sparrow has gone from taken-for-granted to a creature that commands affection precisely because it is endangered.

The return of the sparrows, if we manage it, will not only mark the recovery of a species but the softening of our relationship with the natural world. In a time of overwhelming climate anxiety, when headlines tell us about glaciers collapsing and oceans acidifying, the story of the sparrow offers something intimate, graspable, and hopeful. It tells us that conservation is not always about vast reserves or billion-dollar projects. Sometimes it is about a clay pot on a balcony, a child learning to weave a nest, a genome decoded in a lab, or a pensioner’s quiet persistence.

On certain mornings in Hyderabad, if you pause outside Razak’s home, you will hear it: the insistent chatter of sparrows, as though debating the affairs of the day. It is a sound both familiar and rare, a reminder that silence can be reversed, that absence can be filled again with wings. The vanishing chirp may yet return, if enough of us choose to listen.