Something is killing off Paris’s house sparrows (Passer domesticus). This common urban bird used to be so ubiquitous in the city as to scarcely draw attention, but since 2010, Paris’s house sparrow population has dropped by 50 percent. The huge drop comes some time after a similarly massive drop in London, where sparrow populations dropped by 60 percent between 1994 and 2004. While their disappearance is alarming to say the least, the reasons for Europe’s vanishing urban sparrows remain perplexingly murky. Looking a little deeper, some avian experts believe that it’s actually a dearth of available food that’s starving the sparrows out, as development and tidier management of green spaces has pushed down insect populations.
Source: Citylab, 30 August 2016
http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/08/paris-sparrows-gentrification/498…
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