Birds Around Us in Hyderabad

 How to get Birds around us in Hyderabad back

Some time back I wrote about the project I was working to photograph birds around us in Hyderabad in our apartment complex and the lake near it called Peerancheru lake. This year monsoon has been good and the lake is overflowing with water, to the extent that I spotted some fishermen trying to catch fish in a makeshift raft in waters where they earlier use to just walk in the shallow waters. Monsoons bring an extra supply for insects which form a major diet source for birds especially when they have chicks to feed.

There are many reasons for the dwindling population of common birds like house sparrow in the cities, some of them are

• Telecom towers that emit radiation that is harmful to the birds
• Insecticides use that kill the food source and whatever the birds eat is contaminated.
• Loss of habitat due to the cutting of trees.

Unfortunately, we can not do much about the first two as we have no control over the same, but we can do a few things about the third. While a tree takes many years to grow and we are not sure if we have many years for the dwindling population of city birds to survive. Nature forever Society formed by Mohammad Dilawar has come up with a simple, cost-effective solution.  He has worked on easy to install bird nests and feeders that can be put in on walls, poles, trees and once the birds are comfortable with same they adapt them and live in them for many years. This initiative has been appreciated around the world and Dilawar has featured in Time magazine also.

As part of our contribution, I got in touch with Nature Forever Society and ordered some nests and feeders. As you can see from the pictures they are very easy to install and you do not need any special equipment to install them. So my friends if you are interested in saving some birds please get in touch with Nature forever society and order some nests and feeder, they do not cost much and will go a long way in bringing back the sound of chirping from sparrow, myna and other city birds that have slowly vanished from the city.

As you can see our nests are brand new and birds are yet to come to them, one reason could be that some of them are fairly low-hanging so I need to work with the society to put them at a proper height so that birds are not scared to live in them. The other thing we need to work is on putting some grains in the feeders to attract the birds.

Will keep you posted, please share this post with your friends to spread the message of a simple way of bringing birds around us in Hyderabad back. I am sure you don’t want your kids to learn about birds from textbooks, and tell them this little sparrow is now extinct and I did nothing about it. Trust me your kids will not like this answer.