Indian scientist Mohammed Dilawar devotes his life to saving the sparrow, and warns that its disappearance is an ominous sign. From TIME:
Among India’s tiger-obsessed conservationists, Mohammed Dilawar is an oddity. The former lecturer in environmental studies once turned down an offer to work with tigers, dedicating himself instead to saving the sparrow. Using his own money and working from his home in Nasik in western India, Dilawar runs a project to preserve what he believes is one of India’s most threatened birds.
The house sparrow was once so ubiquitous across India that it appears in folktales and songs. In 2005, when Dilawar stumbled upon a study of the declining population of house sparrows in Britain, he suspected that India was heading the same way, especially in fast-growing urban areas. As Dilawar realized, the fate of the diminutive bird was a portent of larger problems. “The sparrow is to urban ecosystems what the canary was to mines,” he explains.
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