To this day, the campaign of eradicating sparrows, one of the "Four Pests", by the Chinese leader Mao Zedong had remained the biggest disregard for the laws governing the natural world.
Hundreds of millions of tree sparrows were killed after Mao had come to power in 1949. The cull is also known as the Great Sparrow Campaign, as a result of the Chinese rulers' perennial fondness for slogans. Somehow Mao's philosophy "People Will Conquer Nature" led to a superficially convincing theory. It all looked so very scientific to calculate that a single sparrow could consume 4.5 kilos of grain per year. It followed, intuitively, that for every million sparrows killed, enough would be spared to feed 60,000 people.
Oh, and let us not forget, there are more than the simple mathematics. What is abundantly clear, however, is that when we mess with nature we do so at our peril. On one hand, sparrows feed on seeds and grains in the autumn and winter. On the other hand, sparrows feed their hungry chicks on countless millions of insects during the breeding season. With all the sparrows gone, those insects – including vast swarms of locusts, the most destructive pests of all – were celebrating the biggest feast of crops. And then, along came the ill-fated famine. The rest is history.
When my daughter joined one of the tree sparrow census few years ago, I wasn't the first person to feel the relief that sparrows have now been thriving in Hong Kong. What is most remarkable about the survey finding is a 36 percent rebound in the tree sparrow population in 2022.
Or, as we might say, sparrow 1, humans 0.
