Once found in abundance, India's house sparrow is vastly depleting in numbers as its habitat is being threatened . Ornithologists and bird enthusiasts across the country fear the house sparrow would soon be put on the red list of endangered birds.

The last headcount was done five years ago, which confirmed birdwatchers’ worst fears: The sparrow population in southern Andhra Pradesh alone had dropped by 80 per cent, and in the coastal areas of Thiruvananthapuram, the birds disappeared without a trace by 2003.

At the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), ornithologists have finally decided to prepare a baseline data to measure the factors for decline.

“In today’s buildings you can find no place where the sparrows or other birds can nest in comparison to the olden buildings. Then the change in lifestyle because women no longer go out and clean grains; we get all pre packaged and pre cleaned grains. Lack of food for the young ones of sparrows because they don’t get enough insects to feed their young ones. And lots of pollution is there,” said Mohammed Dilwar, an avid conservationist and the recent recepient of Time Magazine’s Environment Heroes.

Pesticides in food-grains, which sparrows consume, lead to their poisoning. In the capital New Delhi, unleaded fuel was introduced almost a decade ago. So the air is cleaner, but the harmful by products choke the tiny birds.

Wild Life conservationist Mike Pandey believes that “If we all make up our mind that we need the sparrows, and we are missing them, we are missing the butterflies as well; then we need to grow flowers, we have to grow crops in our little pots without using fertilisers just so that the pigeons or sparrows can eat them. And if there is food, the sparrows will come. And it can just take a couple of years to turn it around because sparrows are prolific breeders.”

India’s Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh too had stressed the need to preserve biodiversity. He told that now was the time to look beyond commercialisation of agriculture and go back to the old traditions.

But sadly there has been no official documentation of sparrows. This is partly due to be the obsession with big and beautiful birds, many of which are also rare. An astonishing 78 species of India’s rich varieties of birds are at risk.

Experts say the immediate cause for bird extinction is not climate change so much as habitat destruction. Expansion of agriculture, overgrazing and indiscriminate cutting of trees has put India’s forest owl, the Bengal Florican and the Indian vulture, a breath away from extinction.

Its said that the best time to save a species is when it is still common. Otherwise, our feathered friends will enter the critically endangered category.