Once a common bird in every household, whose chirping brought happiness in the mornings known in hindi as "gauraiya" is now slowly disappearing from our cities. The most obvious reason behind this is the increasing urbanization,rapid decline of green cover, mobile radiation and the modern construction of houses is such that they fail to provide a nesting place for these birds. Every year, March 20 is observed as the World Sparrow day to raise awareness about house sparrow and other common urban birds regarding threats to their population.

Our house too had the same modern construction so I decided to provide these birds an artificial house of their own. We used to keep grains and water for them but there was no safe place for them to nest. So I installed small cardboard boxes in many places in the walls of my house. We also left some part of our garden for lawn, kept cooked rice for their young ones in summers and planted several native trees. Gradually they started to nest in these boxes and within one year their number had significantly increased.
Due to the plantation of native trees, many other species of birds like baya weaver started coming to feed in our house.