The number of sparrows in large cities not so long ago was beyond counting. Now they are getting smaller.
Tits are competitors
Ornithologists note that the sparrow population in large cities has decreased several times. The reasons are many - increased city noise, air pollution and even electromagnetic radiation from cell towers, which, according to some, can disrupt the navigation ability of birds. There are even creepy versions - for example, that sparrows are purposefully destroyed by city pest control services.
“Sparrows have disappeared not only in large cities of Russia - the situation is the same in Western Europe,” Viktor Zubakin, a representative of the Russian Bird Conservation Union, Ph. D. in Biology, told AiF. - You can often see that the townspeople are feeding pigeons in the squares and boulevards, but the sparrows, as before, are not nearby. Although tits, bullfinches and even tap dancers still come to feed on humans. And the field, rural sparrow, which nests in the hollows of trees on the city outskirts, is gradually increasing its number.
Ornithologists believe that the point is in the peculiarities of modern architecture: house sparrows love to nest in inaccessible nooks and niches of old buildings, also because they give off heat in the cold season. However, European cities are increasingly being built up with buildings with smooth walls and roofs without cornices, utilities are trying to seal all holes and cracks, and attics are turning into glazed attics and apartments. Therefore, the sparrows are left with only cornices, gutters, trees and lanterns.
Wings not byak-byak
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“The main reason for the disappearance of these birds is that they have less food,” says the head of the laboratory of ecology and bird behavior management at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. Severtsova Olga Silaeva. - Moscow, for example, became cleaner, they began to clean it better, there were fewer open garbage cans. By the way, there are still a lot of sparrows in the Moscow Zoo, because there is plenty of their usual food there”.
Today containers are airtight and often sit in a covered fence. It is more difficult for small birds to get to edible waste.
Perhaps the point is also that the sparrows lack natural food for their chicks - insects and caterpillars. Remember the lawns of our childhood with daisies and dandelions? There were grasshoppers jumping, beetles and ants crawling, butterflies and bees flying. Today, natural meadow communities have disappeared in cities, and artificial and short-cut lawns are extremely poor in this sense.
Bird watchers recall how in the spring and summer large flocks of sparrows fed in the tall grass of city lawns, collecting insects for their broods. They also looked for fledgling seeds - chicks that learn to fly. The birds have settled in flocks on the bushes, but in recent decades their branches have been regularly pruned, and urban farms monitor the condition of the lawns, cut them, cover them with peat and cover them with rolls of artificially grown grass that does not give flowers and seeds. Insects don't live there.
Other birds that appear in the city have learned to survive in new conditions: starlings feed on earthworms, titmice eat insects in tree crowns, and pigeons feed chicks with gruel from the goiter. There is a version that the sparrows simply moved to the forests and fields of the suburbs, where there is a lot of their usual food. However, according to ornithologists, this is not so: house sparrows do not migrate anywhere from their territory, but starve and die out due to the fault of people.