| Q11. Would you like to share a story about House Sparrows from this time period? | Patna to Kahalgaon by Road. On 16th April 2012 I travelled from Patna to Kahalgaon by road on NH-30, NH-31 and NH-80 in a comfortable Mahendra Xylo occupying front seat next to the driver and this provided me an opportunity to watch birds and butterflies of the area. As I had already contributed few observations about sparrows in Citizen Sparrow online survey from other parts of India, I was curious to locate sparrows in this part of Bihar. Starting at 09:00AM from Patna airport we covered a distance of about 250 km in 8 hours and reached Kahalgaon at 05:00 PM. We drove through numerous villages with thatched huts (good nesting places for sparrows), busy market places with roadside kirana shops (food source for birds) and also ripening wheat fields just outside the villages on both the sides of the road. The road ran parallel to river Ganga on the right bank. With so many favourable factors I expected to see hordes of sparrows on the way but it was not to be. It came as a big surprise because all along people were seen harvesting/ threshing wheat or transporting large bundles of just cut wheat elsewhere. Towards the end of the journey there were few villages (eg Ghogha) where maize seeds were seen spread on the ground for drying. I saw my first sparrow for the day only at 2.30 PM at Bariyarpur ( two of them were seen flying in to a roadside hut). Then at 4.00PM, I spotted 2 more near Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University and then three more at 04:25PM near Bihar Agricultural University and finally my last at Ghogha village at 04:45 PM. At 05:00 PM, we reached Kahalgaon and there I did not find any sparrow. During the same period I spotted about 50 Common Myna, 25 Crow, and 10 Blue Rock Pigeons. We passed through busy congested markets where open sacks of grains were kept outside the shops but still there were no sparrows. Plain Tiger butterfly was spotted throughout the day during the journey as its larval food plants Calotropis procera and C. gigantea (Aak) were present in large numbers on both the sides of the road. Other butterflies seen included : Common Castor (1), Emigrant(2), Common Grass Yellow(1), Common Crow(1), Common Mormon(1) and Lime Butterfly(1). Places covered during the journey:
Patna Airport 25.594610 85.091015
Bakhtiarpur 25.460653 85.534871
Barh 25.476343 85.708973
Pandarak 25.494585 85.757971
Maranchi 25.355609 85.993983
Barahiya 25.283460 86.018540
Lakhi Sarai 25.189715 86.106988
Surya Garha 25.245739 86.223229
Bariyar Pur 25.319548 86.562742
Akbar Nagar 25.235844 86.836455
Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University
25.249227 86.956671
Bihar Agriculture University
25.237541 87.047966
Ghogha 25.211975 87.164801
Kahakgaon 25.263756 87.234154
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