What's Killing Off the Sparrows of Paris?

Something is killing off Paris’s house sparrows. 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. Pollution, electromagnetic radiation and contemporary architecture have all been blamed. Now in a fresh twist on the discussion, the French media is pointing the finger at an entirely new culprit: gentrification.