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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Sparrows were every where in Bangalore when I was growing up. After the city grew crazy, the pollution grew and so did the Mobile phone towers.

You won't be able to find a single sparrow today. Not one. There is a also a noticeable decline in other bird population and diversity. Mostly because Bangalore's lakes are gone. There was a lake called Hebbal Lake where migratory birds would visit from Australia every year. They've stopped coming.

Unmitigated disaster.

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Vultures man, those are things that we nearly lead to extinction recently in India. I remember when I was a kid there used to be a road in Delhi with the dead tree and vultures sitting all over it. But by the time I was an adult there were no Vultures in most of India. The heavy use of antibiotics we realised too late was causing the decline. The Parsi people (zorastrians) were impacted badly because their religious practice is to let the body be eaten away by animals, and without vultures the bodies were just rotting very badly.

We had a Parsi tower of silence in Bangalore as well. It was in the outskirts back in the day. The city consumed those areas and they are now in the heart of the city. I wonder where the facility is these days.

What nearly wiped out the vultures wasn't antibiotics... there may be other factors, but the main one was a specific anti-inflammatory drug (diclofenac) which was used liberally in treating any sign of illness in livestock and which turned out to be highly toxic to vultures. It is now banned in India. The thing about livestock medicine today is that diagnosis is generally too expensive for individual cases... if an animal looks sick you basically give an anti-inflammatory and an antibiotic and hope for the best, the former so that it'll feel well enough to eat so it won't get too weak, and the later to hopefully cure the illness. So both anti-inflammatory and antibiotics get used very liberally, to tragic consequences.

Hebbal lake still exists, and does see migrant birds like painted storks and pelicans every winter. You can see for yourself, and BngBirds visits Hebbal Lake on the first Sunday of every month to see birds. The migrant birds that do visit India in winter come from colder parts of Asia and Europe, not Australia btw.

Yes many lakes are destroyed in Bangalore and there are no sparrows. Its doubtful that mobile towers have anything to do with it though.

>>Hebbal lake still exists

More like Hebbal Pool. You call that a lake? It was way bigger when I was a kid. The other side where Lumbini gardens exists now is literally reduced to a recreational pool.

And yes birds from Australia indeed used to visit Hebbal Lake. I guess that very memory is erased and sounds largely alien to people now.

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