Not common or in the garden

I am not surprised if you missed World Sparrow Day on March 20, just as I am philosophical about my friends going rather quiet and rolling their eyes when I mention seeing puff-throated babblers and spangled drongos (birds again) in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The humble sparrow, though, has been receiving more attention than you might expect in New Delhi, and not only because World Sparrow Day was launched by India's Nature Forever Society. The reason is that Delhi is the latest of the world's great cities to suffer a mysterious collapse in the population of the once-ubiquitous house sparrow, Passer domesticus.

Two years ago the capital's then-chief minister, Sheila Dikshit, acknowledged the crisis when she adopted the house sparrow as Delhi's "state bird", promising to ensure that the species "returns, feels safe and is able to live peacefully in the city".

It is not as if all of urban India's familiar birds and wildlife are disappearing in the maelstrom of urbanisation. In or near our home in New Delhi, we routinely see the creatures immortalised in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book tale "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi": the eponymous mongoose himself, Darzee the tailorbird, the coppersmith barbet (a bird with a call "like the beating of a hammer on a copper pot", as Kipling puts it) and Chuchundra the muskrat - but not, thankfully, Nag the cobra and his evil wife Nagaina.

Yet there are no sparrows. Their absence is important, according to Nature Forever's founder and president Mohammed Dilawar, because the common sparrow is like the "common man" of India, and gives ordinary city-dwellers an intimate and otherwise unattainable link to the country's rich wildlife.

"For them the sparrow is the only connect with nature," he says. "A rickshaw-driver in Delhi - for him to go to see a tiger in Ranthambore or Jim Corbett [national parks] is beyond his reach." That is especially true in the outer parts of the fast-expanding city, which are less green and bird-friendly than our own central neighbourhood of parks and gardens.

Mr Dilawar also recalls the disaster of Mao Zedong's "Great Sparrow Campaign" during the Great Leap Forward half a century ago. Sparrows were designated as one of four pests to be eradicated because they eat grain. But they also feed on worms and crop-eating insects, and their near-extermination probably contributed to the catastrophic Chinese famine that followed.

Lack of sparrow-food in today's concrete and tar-smothered cities, in fact, is thought by ornithologists to be one cause of the house sparrow's decline in London, Delhi and other big cities after 10,000 years of cohabitation between bird and man, and the global spread of the species from the Middle East.

Another problem is that modern high-rise buildings do not often have the kind of jeev raksha ("life preserving") niches common in older structures, where house sparrows would typically build their nests of straw, feathers and other materials.

Pradip Krishen, a film-maker and author who has championed native plants and written the definitive field guide Trees of Delhi, says he fears that Indians are not particularly interested in biodiversity or wildlife, despite their habit of distributing food for birds, dogs and other animals for religious and cultural reasons. "It's all about earning points in heaven," he sighs. "It's not about loving animals."

All is not lost for the sparrow, however. Mr Dilawar put me in touch with Nin Taneja, an artist and one of his "sparrow adopters", who has made her Delhi balcony a haven and feeding centre for wild birds, including the odd house sparrow. "Living in a city, a concrete area like Delhi, I wish to be always around nature," she says. "So I made my balcony very bird-friendly."

I went there on a warm spring evening. I saw bulbuls. I saw parakeets. I saw pigeons. I even saw silverbills, which resemble sparrows in shape and size. But no sparrows.

It was not until I found myself 1,400km away in central Mumbai that I awoke to the persistent cheeping characteristic of busy house sparrows - and there they were in the rafters of the vast, open balconies of the venerable Royal Bombay Yacht Club. In the centre of New Delhi, I still await my first sighting.

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