Today, 20 March, is the World Sparrow Day. We pay a tribute to house sparrows Passer domesticus for being cute collaborators in our projects.

For more information about WSD, check the official website. The site and the WSD are meant to raise public awareness regarding the collapse of some house sparrow populations. See e.g. the case in the UK here and here, and two reviews here and here. More references can be found here. These studies show that even the populations of a relatively generalist and human-tolerant species can be doomed to severe decline due to changes in land-use.

Fortunately, the population trend of the house sparrow in Romania is stable and population sizes are large all over the country. Indeed, the potential causes of population declines identified in Western Europe are still relatively negligible in our country. Still because there are clear signs that the intensification of land-use will take a similar path to what occurred in Western Europe some decades before. We hope that WSD will attain its major scope and thus contribute to prevent the most pessimistic scenario.

Happy WSD!