Free Feral Cities by Tristan Donovan

excluded,” says Will, adding that as property prices have risen, more and more Londoners are paving over their front gardens to turn them into parking spaces, which means there are also fewer sources for the seed and insects sparrows eat.
    In short, as our cities improve, the house sparrow loses out.

    Few places are undergoing as much development as Nashik in Maharashtra, India. This metropolis of one and a half million people is the sixteenth fastest-growing city in the world. Space is tight and the noise of construction is never far away. New high rises are springing up, and so many people are moving in from the countryside that the city is struggling to build the infrastructure needed to cope with them fast enough.
    It’s a pattern being replicated across India. The country is urbanizing at breakneck speed, and as ramshackle streets with ramshackle houses give way to office blocks and shopping malls, the sparrow is in retreat.
    â€œIn my childhood the sparrows were so numerous,” recalls Mohammed Dilawar, who grew up in Nashik in the 1980s. Back then less than half a million people lived there. “At that time in Indian homes you could have sparrows making nests behind the window panes, on top of the cupboards, between suitcases. Even in the homes there were sparrow nests.” Mohammed’s own family home had sparrows nesting in the canopy of their ceiling fan. “If it was summer and the sparrow nest was there, you would stop using the fan,” he tells me.
    Did people not object to birds living in their homes? I ask. “We were brought up not to disturb the sparrow nest. In those times hygiene and these issues were not so much of a care. That was the kind of culture of we had in India, a very open culture. A culturewhere your neighbor could regularly just walk into your home unannounced.”
    Sparrows were not the only bird that imprinted itself on Mohammed’s childhood. “I used to see hundreds of vultures foraging every day and that used to fascinate me—to see these vultures sitting there. Since we did not have access to a lot of other things, my entire childhood was spent seeing sparrows, birds, and vultures.”
    Today, he rarely sees vultures. The few that are left live on the outskirts of Nashik in tiny groups. The fate of the vultures haunts Mohammed: “The Indian species of vulture went from being the most common raptor in the world to being the most critically endangered bird. It only took ten years, which is faster than the extinction of the dodos.”
    What he finds saddest is that no one even noticed. “Because of a society that was deprived, we didn’t have access to things like television or the mobiles, so when these things came in people got so engrossed in the television and their mobiles they didn’t even realize what they were losing around them.”
    Mohammed figured that if the vulture could go from abundance to near extinction in a few years then so too could his beloved sparrows. So he decided to act. He founded the conservation group Nature Forever Society and launched World Sparrow Day, an international event designed to raise awareness of the sparrow’s plight. He persuaded the government of Delhi to make the sparrow the official bird of the Indian capital and started selling tens of thousands of cheap bird feeders and nest boxes to Indian city dwellers who wanted to give the sparrow a helping hand.
    Mohammed says the sparrow is like the tiger—a gauge of ecological health. It is the canary in the coal mine, “the ambassador for urban conservation,” and its success—or lack of it—reflects how suitable our cities are for wildlife.
    â€œIndia is one of the most rapidly growing countries in the world,” he says. “Most of the population in the coming years is going to be concentrated in urban locations or cities. Now imagine cities oftomorrow that are devoid of nature, devoid of sparrows and