Children Aims to include more societies by next year.
Vadodara,
Instead of distributing and installing the sparrow nests like every year about 20 children from Vasna based residential society in a unique initiative conducted the census of the Home Sparrows.
Residing in Samruddhi Society located on Vasna Road, the children said that they had decided to celebrate the day differently and instead of forwarding the messages on whatsapp and installing the sparrow nests at their homes, they decided to take stock of the efforts which were made earlier. While there are more than 30 children in the age group of 5 to 14, about 20 of them got together and decided to conduct the census.

“Members of our society have been installing sparrow nests and because of that we have seen substantial increase in the number of home sparrows. We realized that we have no idea how many sparrows were there five years back and how many are there today and that is when the idea of counting the sparrows in our own society struck,” said Dwij Pandya.
The children divided themselves into groups and each group was assigned the job of counting the sparrow nesting in their respective lanes. “In many homes there were nests but either it had no nesting or they were occupied by other birds. Even we were surprised to learn that and we realized that not all the sparrow nests are fit for Home Sparrows,” said Krisha Desai one of the participating children.

Another participant of the census, Hetanshu Sevak said, “We would like to cover other societies as well and for that we would get in touch with children from the societies adjacent to ours. If 20 of us can take up this task why can’t all the children from Vadodara get together and conduct the census.”
The children estimated about 96 sparrows in a single residential society. “In all there were total 48 nesting out of which 43 were of House Sparrow and rest of the nests were of other birds like Myna, Robin and other small birds. That means we have 86 sparrows in our society. We were really excited to realize this fact and now we are going to work hard on how we can increase this number.”