Free Feral Cities by Tristan Donovan Page A

other birds.
    â€œA common man in India, from when he is born to the time he dies, might not go outside the city. There are a lot of people in India who find it difficult to get two square meals a day, so you can’t expect those people to spend a fortune to go to a national park to see a tiger. For such a population, the sparrow and other birds that stay in urban locations are the only connection between humanity and wildlife.”
    Mohammed’s campaign has made waves.
Time
magazine even named him one of the world’s foremost environmental heroes. But many challenges remain.
    The time when sparrows could freely nest in people’s ceiling fans is being left behind. “Somewhere in the 1990s the culture in India started changing, so from being a very open culture it started becoming a closed culture or a private culture of the type one sees in the UK or the western countries,” he says. “Open windows started closing up, and from a culture where you knew everything what is happening in the family of your neighbor, today we are in a culture where you don’t even realize who your neighbor is. Because of this closed culture, the homes started getting closed and these sites were lost for sparrows.”
    The way food is sold in India is another important change, he adds. “During the ’80s women used to sit outside their homes cleaning grains and other vegetables, so there was food for the sparrow. Today, women no longer sit outside their homes and clean grain in India. They just walk into a store and buy pre-packed grain. This answers a lot of the reason why the food source for sparrows has gone down.”
    Another pressure India’s city sparrows face is being killed not by cats or sparrowhawks but by people armed with plastic catapults that cost as little as five rupees. That’s about eight cents. The reason the birds are being hunted is simple: hunger. “In India the cost of fresh fish or meat is very high now. A lot of people cannotafford buying protein over the counter, so they go out and kill wild animals because it’s free,” says Mohammed, who wants the Indian government to ban people from using catapults in this way. “This problem is increasing in cities because a lot of people who used to live in rural areas have migrated to the cities as laborers, and these people have the skills and knowledge to kill urban wildlife.”
    As India continues to urbanize, the pressure on the sparrow is likely to grow but, Mohammed says, the fight to save the oldest bird on the city block—a bird whose success reflects the state of the towns and cities we live in—is too important to fail. “When you save a species like sparrows, or for that matter any other wildlife found around cities, you don’t only save them, but you save a lot of plants that depend on them. You save a lot of landscapes,” he says. “A city becomes healthy if there is a big enough amount of wildlife within. This is something that is very, very important.”
    The contrasting attitudes to the declining house sparrow and the starlings that invade US cities says a lot about how we view urban wildlife. When house sparrows were abundant in cities, we viewed them as pests and berated them for causing many of the same problems as the starlings of Indianapolis. But now that they are vanishing from our streets, we see them as lovable victims in need of rescue rather than elimination.
    It’s not a matter of us preferring sparrows over starlings, either. In European cities, starlings have been declining fast too, prompting campaigns to save the birds that cause so many problems in urban America.
    It seems we have a love-hate relationship with urban wildlife. We want animals around us, but only if they know their place. We revile them when they succeed at living among us, but we’ll miss them when they’re gone.

STREET HUNTERS
Living with Boars and Raccoons in