The Endangered Sparrow

I was reading this article in the newspaper today about why the common sparrow was becoming so rare to come by these days and I was surprised how much I agreed with the finding and also by the fact that they had omitted looking into another dimension of the problem. The article stated several reasons for the decreasing numbers of sparrows in general and their absence from city life. One of the main reasons this article pointed out was the availability of food.

Sparrows survive on seeds and insects. The rampant use of pesticides has affected the availability of insects that the sparrows feed on. The use of engineered grass in a large scale in the cities has also led to the disappearance of local varieties of grass and its seeds on which the sparrows used to feast. The use of artificially modified food grains are also being seen as a reason for the depletion of the sparrow population. Ornithologists say that these modified food grains are acting as slow poison for the sparrows. In the context of the almost absence of sparrows in cities, ornithologists have blamed the modern architectural style. They argue that the best place for sparrows to make their nests is cool dark crevices that old large and open houses used to provide. The present structure of box shaped architecture provides inadequate locations for sparrows to make their nests. I more or less agree with all these findings as they seem logical and I have no means of verifying these findings. But I have been taken aback by the fact that everyone seems to have missed one important factor (at least I think it is important).

When I was very little, our backyard used to be filled with sparrows. There was a pomegranate tree in the back and sparrows used to make their nests on it. They were numerous. But by the year 2000, their numbers suddenly declined and now I rarely see them at all. When I go to the outskirts of the town, I see sparrows in abundance. This made me think a lot and I have come up with a theory. I have noticed that the sudden reduction in the number of sparrows in my neighbourhood coincided with the construction of a transmission tower for cellular services. The sudden disappearance of sparrows from other regions of my town, I found out, also coincided with the construction of similar towers in these regions. The sparrow population has moved back to the outskirts because there are no transmission towers there. I think that this is too much of a coincidence. The disappearance of the sparrow from city life has got to do, to a large extent, something with the spread of cellular services. The radio waves used by the cellular service seems to be affecting the sparrow which is forcing it to flee areas where these waves are strong.

Research has been going on for a long time about the effect of these radio waves on living tissues but no conclusive study has yet been published. If what I propose is true then it is time we looked into the matter more closely. Corporates will not be willing to agree to the fact that these waves have harmful effects on living tissues as such a finding will affect their business and they will be forced to spend more on finding alternative solutions. But it is time we broke out of this vicious circle of protecting a few at the cost of the rest. No one profits in such an arrangement for a long time. Dictatorship needs to be replaced by democracy.