House sparrow

 Many in India have grown up with the chirruping of the house sparrows. These tiny little grey birds have been constant companions, sometimes noisy neighbors, morning alarm bells, and fluttering representatives of the aerial species that live amidst humans.
 
Unfortunately, while once you opened your windows to be automatically greeted by their calls, the house sparrows have stopped calling your house their home in the present world.

Their numbers are dwindling at such a high rate, that conservationists are concerned, that this specie that has had such an amicable relationship with the urban world, may slowly but steadily be losing its population and just not finding its little space among the concrete jungle anymore. According to a survey there has been an 80 percent decline in their population.

Today the reasons for the sparrows’ decline are largely electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones and lack of insect food due to excessive use of pesticide in urban gardens. But most certainly, it is the loss of habitat that drives any species towards extinction.

It is therefore, that last year the world decided to dedicate a day to the common house bird that is becoming uncommon. 20^th March is thus World House Sparrow day.

If you have been friends with this chirrupy neighbor for a long time and want your kids and their kids to remember the feathery mate as fondly as you have, just pledge today that you will make your home more house sparrow friendly.

Here is how,

• Create a mini forest within your housing society or home compound.
• The house sparrow is not a fussy eater, therefore place any kind of seed, flower seed, bread, and grain and even home leftovers at a pre designated place every day for them to feed on.
• Place a water vessel at a comfortable location.
• If you have the space in your balcony or garden, hang a nesting place like a bamboo basket, an earthen pot that they find safe and secure.
• Use cellular phones as little as possible.

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sit for tigris

Tigers to be saved

As few as 3,200 tigers are at all-time now, Asian big cats may be on top of the food chain and one of the most culturally important and best-loved animals, but they are also vulnerable to extinction. Tigers are forced to compete for space with dense human populations, face unrelenting pressure from poaching, retaliatory killings and habitat loss across their range.

By saving tigers, we also save the biologically rich and diverse landscapes where they still roam — Asia’s last great rain forests, jungles and wild lands. These forests are home to thousands of other species, people and the food, freshwater and flood protection that local communities need to survive.

Three tiger subspecies - the Bali, Javan, and Caspian - have become extinct in the past 70 years. The six remaining subspecies - Amur, Bengal, Indochinese, Malayan, South China, and Sumatran - live only in Asia, and all are threatened by poaching and habitat loss.

more details......

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corals

Coral organisms, called polyps, can live on their own, but are primarily associated with the spectacularly diverse limestone communities, or reefs, they construct.


Coral polyps are tiny, soft-bodied organisms related to sea anemones and jellyfish. At their base is a hard, protective limestone skeleton called a calicle, which forms the structure of coral reefs. Reefs begin when a polyp attaches itself to a rock on the sea floor, then divides, or buds, into thousands of clones. The polyp calicles connect to one another, creating a colony that acts as a single organism. As colonies grow over hundreds and thousands of years, they join with other colonies and become reefs. Some of the coral reefs on the planet today began growing over 50 million years ago. Clownfish live at the bottom of shallow seas in sheltered reefs


Coral polyps are actually translucent animals. Reefs get their wild hues from the billions of colorful  algae they host. When stressed by such things as temperature change or pollution, corals will evict their boarders, causing coral bleaching that can kill the colony if the stress is not mitigated.


Corals live in tropical waters throughout the world, generally close to the surface where the sun's rays can reach the algae. While corals get most of their nutrients from the byproducts of the algae's photosynthesis, they also have barbed, venomous tentacles they can stick out, usually at night, to grab small fish.


Coral reefs teem with life, covering less than one percent of the ocean floor, but supporting about 25 percent of all marine creatures. However, threats to their existence abound, and scientists estimate that human factors—such as pollution, global warming, and sedimentation—could kill 30 percent of the existing reefs in the next 30 years.

Corals are so sensitive to climatic change that scientists study coral reef fossils to construct highly detailed chronologies of prehistoric climate patterns.

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