Humans have admired, hunted, and bred birds through much of our history. Stephen Moss’ book, “Ten Birds That Changed the World” is a fascinating exploration of ten bird species with remarkable natural histories and often, disastrous interactions with humans. Here are short summaries of two of the stories, but believe me, I am not doing justice to these two birds’ stories, let alone the other eight I don’t have time to describe.
The story of the Tree Sparrow, specifically the European Tree Sparrow, Passer montanus unfolds in 1958 China, during the height of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong had an iron grip on everything and everyone. In his “Great Leap Forward” Mao announced he would eradicate four pests including tree sparrows that ate grain from the cultivated fields and cut into the annual grain harvest. To exterminate the sparrows, Mao enlisted everyone, from the tiniest child to the oldest adults to harass and kill every sparrow they could find. They banged pots and pans, preventing the sparrows from roosting, until they either fell to the ground exhausted or tried to fly away only to be harassed to death someplace else. They claimed they killed one billion tree sparrows, and though this might be an exaggeration, the number killed was likely in the hundreds of millions. This blind obedience to Mao won the battle but lost the war; with no sparrows to eat them, the insect population exploded, and the insects stripped the crops of all their grain. The yield of the harvest plummeted and within 12 months it was evident the country was headed into famine. Mao stopped the killing once he was convinced it was a disastrous policy.
What led to his reversal? A Chinese zoologist trained in the US, Tso-hsin Cheng, realized from the start that eliminating the sparrows would upset a delicate ecosystem and could have devastating consequences. He and his colleagues carefully analyzed the diets of the tree sparrows and determined that while they did eat some grain, during the sparrow’s breeding season they mostly ate insects. They contacted the Chinese Academy of Sciences who notified the Chinese Communist Party and Mao ended the rampage against the tree sparrows. But it was too late. In fewer than three years between 15 and 55 million Chinese died, mostly from famine.
The second story is about the guanay cormorant, a handsome sea bird with a black back and a snowy white chest, looking rather like a Maître d’ at a fancy restaurant. The cormorants feast on the abundant anchovies and silversides in the cold nutrient-rich waters of the Humboldt Current stretching along the Pacific Coast of South America. They live in dense colonies on high cliffs and islands along the coast of Peru where it is extremely arid. Because it is so dry, and because they live in dense colonies, the cormorants’ droppings, known as guano, accumulate and do not wash away as they would if it were rainy. Their droppings are rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium – a perfect fertilizer – as was known to the Incas who used the guano on their crops. It wasn’t until the 1800s when a sample was brought back to Great Britain that Europeans learned of this “brown gold”.
While a few men became wealthy importing the guano, countless Chinese men were lured onto boats supposedly headed for California but sent to Peru to mine the guano. There they lived a miserable life and rarely survived their five-year contracts.
The guano deposits were exhausted after about 30 years and the mining largely ended. But in that time, the cormorant numbers were decimated due to the disturbance to their breeding habitat and consumption of the birds themselves and their eggs. However, from the early twentieth century on, Peru has protected the cormorants and only allows mining after they complete their breeding season. The Guanay Cormorant is now considered near threatened, but hopefully their numbers will recover.
The other birds highlighted in this book include the bald eagle, the emperor penguin, Darwin’s finches, the turkey, the dodo, the pigeon, the raven and the snowy egret. Each story is fascinating and unexpectedly dramatic.
Finally, as a follow-up to the story about the tree sparrows, you might think that the scientists who untangled the relation between the sparrows, the insects and the harvest would have been hailed as heroes, but the zoologist, Cheng, already suspect because he had studied in the US was declared a criminal under a new anti-intellectual climate. In the United States today, many scientists and their research are being disdained, derided and defunded. I hope that powerful people will soon realize the value of science and will not make the same short-sighted blunders made in Mao’s China not so many years ago.
The book is Ten Birds that Changed the World by Stephen Moss.
