Kees Moeliker, our European Bureau Chief, reports the latest about leaden sparrow research. (This is related only distantly to Jonathan Corum’s Python-inspired reseach report “Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow.”) Moeliker writes:
Ramallah, a city on the West Bank (Palestinian Authority) known best from the Israel-Palestinian conflict, was also the study area of K.M. Swaileh and R. Sansur, both researchers at the Birzeit University. They captured some house sparrows (under license from Palestinian Ministry for Environmental Affairs) from the Ramallah streets, and – as reported in their paper “Monitoring urban heavy metal pollution using the House Sparrow“, in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring (vol. 8, 2006, pp. 209-13): “birds were sacrified, put in plastic bags and deep-frozen for later analysis.” Subsequently the sparrows were dissected, various tissue samples were digested in super-pure nitric and perchloric acids, and analysed. Their results “provide some evidence for the potential of the house sparrow as a biomonitor for urban heavy metal pollution.” It should be noted that leaded fuel was still used in the Palestinian Territories at the time of the study.