MORPHOMETRIC VARIATION OF HOUSE SPARROW, PASSER DOMESTICUS IN POLLUTED AND UNPOLLUTED AREAS IN TURKEY

The House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) is one of the successful animals in adapting themselves to an urban-life environment and broadly distributed bird species in the world. We compared three sparrow populations using morphological parameters in Turkey: unpolluted areas, Antalya (Ciglik village) and Burdur (Yazikoy village), and Mugla (Yatagan) where is polluted by Yatagan Thermal Power Plant. Fifteen morphometrically characters of 131 caught birds from tree populations were compared on the basis of gender. The stepwise discriminant analysis which classified 76.9% of the birds, retained 5 measurements allowing discriminating between populations: bill length, 8th primer, body mass, bill height, and wing length. Wing, 8th primary, tail, and alula measurements of gender were found significantly different by t-tests (p < 0.05) for tree populations. Yatagan female is quite different from the others by function 1 and function 2 in canonical discriminant analyses. I suggested that differentiations between populations depend on ecological conditions of these areas and also Yatagan populations may be affected by Thermal Power Plant.