Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on House Sparrows Comparative Study from an Indian Context Sudeep R. Bapat1and Sreeranjini T. M.2

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Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on House Sparrows:

Comparative Study from an Indian Context

Sudeep R. Bapat1,∗and Sreeranjini T. M.2

1Indian Institute of Management Indore

2University of Hyderabad

∗sudeepb@iimidr.ac.in

Abstract: Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the last couple of years have been drastic in terms of human

behavioural patterns. People were forced to stay at home for a very long duration because of the strict

lockdown measures imposed by governments all over the globe. India was no exception, wherein the Indian

government imposed several very strict lockdowns all across the country, which restricted human activities

and their social behaviours. However, such restrictions were seen to have a positive impact on environment

and ecology. In this paper, we aim to study the changes in House Sparrow sightings, as a result of the

lockdowns. Are the house sparrows back? is the question we try to answer, using appropriate exploratory

analysis and statistical modelling.

Keywords: House Sparrow; ecology; COVID-19; human behaviour; detectibility

1 Introduction

The “House sparrow”, scientiﬁcally known as Passer domesticus is one of the most commonly found birds

across India. Since a very long time, the relationship between human beings and sparrows has been har-

monious. They are easily observable in windows and balconies of houses, which shows how well they have

adapted with the human lifestyle. A typical house sparrow sighted in India is as seen in Figure 1. But

since the starting of the 21st century, their population has been threatened and the population curve is also

dipping. Several reasons have been cited for this decline, one of them being the increasing urbanization and

pollution. Organizations like Nature Forever Society (NFS) have adopted several measures to conserve spar-

rows like “Common Bird Monitoring of India”, “World Sparrow Day”, “Project Save Our Sparrows”, among

others. In literature, there have been many research articles published in recent times, which also suggest a

decline in the number of house sparrows. Some of these include, an article by Sharma and Binner (2020),

where the authors indeed claim a decline in their number, according to a study conducted by the Indian

Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Even though the cause of decline was not known speciﬁcally, it is

believed that it was due to the non-availability of nests, due to modernization and urbanization. Another

article is that by Paul (2015), where similar conclusions are drawn. Narayanappa (2022) conjectured that

the house sparrow is on the verge of decline due to urbanization which leads to the unavailability of suitable

nesting sites. Modak (2017) studied the impact of urbanization on house sparrow distribution, particularly

in the city of Kolkata, India. A few other related articles which one may refer to are by Ghosh et al. (2010),

Chaudhary (2020) or Deepalakshmi and Salomi (2019).

In this paper, we focus on a related issue, that of studying the eﬀects of COVID-19 lockdowns on house

sparrow counts. As discussed earlier, the pandemic impacted the entire world drastically. Human behaviours

and social interactions were hampered, mainly because of the strict lockdowns imposed by governments across

the globe. However, such lockdowns were a boon to the ecology and the environment. The wildlife sightings

increased after COVID hit and especially during lockdowns. One belief is that since the humans were not

allowed to roam much, they could spend more time observing and recording such sightings. There have

already been a lot of literature stating that the lockdowns indeed impacted the wildlife in a positive way.

One may refer to Basile et al. (2021), where the authors investigated how stay-at-home orders aﬀected data

submitted by birdwatchers in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. Schrimpf et al. (2021) found that

counts of several focal bird species changed in pandemic-altered areas, usually increasing in comparison to

prepandemic era. Seress et al. (2021) assessed changes in reproductive success of great tits (Parus major)

arXiv:2210.03342v1 [stat.AP] 7 Oct 2022

at two urban habitats, due to the COVID pandemic. Gordo et al. (2021) studied the birds’ response to the

population lockdown by using bird records collected by a citizen science project in northeastern Spain.

Figure 1. Image provided by eBird (www.ebird.org) and created on [16/04/2015]

The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 provides the methodology used for the analysis, along

with a brief description of the dataset. Section 3 covers the statistical analysis and modelling of the sparrow

counts using appropriate count regression models, while Section 4 includes a brief discussion.

2 Methodology

In this paper, we aim to study the eﬀect of the COVID-19 pandemic and hence the reduction in human

noise on the count of house sparrows in the country of India. In order to do so, we downloaded data on

house sparrow count in India from e-bird, which is one of the largest biodiversity science projects with more

than 100 million bird sightings contributed annually by eBirders around the world. On January 30th, 2020,

India’s ﬁrst ever COVID case was reported in the state of Kerala. As the number of COVID cases increased,

the Prime Minister of India announced a nationwide lockdown on the midnight of March 24th, which lasted

initially for 21 days. Further, it was extended up to May 31st, 2020. The movement and activities of the

citizens got restricted as a result of this imposition of lockdown. This sudden pause in the human activities

also astonishingly brought down the air and noise pollution levels. This gave us a rare opportunity to carry

out a comparative study about how the less crowded and noisy cities aﬀected the lives of birds like house

sparrows. One of the assumptions is that the strict “stay at home” orders might have brought more people

into birdwatching and the time spent on such activities might have increased. Thus, we hypothesized that

there could be an increase in the daily number of observations after the imposition of lockdown.

For this study and analysis, our dataset contains 187898 e-bird house sparrow checklists from 01/01/2018

to 30/11/2021 collected by bird observers across India. We tried to analyze the changes in the number of

bird counts during lockdown as compared to that in previous years. We did a yearly comparison of the daily

number of counts from 2018 to 2021, which very well includes the COVID phase as well. Additionally, we

performed a phase-wise comparison during the COVID period, by focusing on the daily bird count in each

phase, where the phases are formed by dividing the timeline to ‘before lockdown’, ‘during lockdown’ and

‘after lockdown’. For a better understanding, the following points outline the phases which we chose, along

with the corresponding dates.

•Phase 1: before ﬁrst lockdown (before 24/03/2020)

•Phase 2: during ﬁrst lockdown (24/03/2020 to 31/05/2020)

•Phase 3: before second lockdown (01/06/2020 to 04/04/2021)

•Phase 4: during second lockdown (05/04/2021 to 15/06/2021)

•Phase 5: after second lockdown (16/06/2021 to 31/11/2021)

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摘要：

ImpactofCOVID-19LockdownsonHouseSparrows:ComparativeStudyfromanIndianContextSudeepR.Bapat1;andSreeranjiniT.M.21IndianInstituteofManagementIndore2UniversityofHyderabadsudeepb@iimidr.ac.inAbstract:DuetotheoutbreakofCOVID-19,thelastcoupleofyearshavebeendrasticintermsofhumanbehaviouralpatterns.Peoplew...

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Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on House Sparrows Comparative Study from an Indian Context Sudeep R. Bapat1and Sreeranjini T. M.2

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