Mao Said Kill The Sparrow
     By Dr. Ken Baker
In April 1958, during the early days of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a horde of urban laborers surrounded the Polish embassy in Beijing, banging on drums, pots and pans, non-stop, for two days and nights.

Within four years, some 20 million to 45 million people — the exact figure has been difficult to determine with certainty — had died of starvation across China, in no small part due to the banging of pots.

… The better part of a foot of snow covers our tiny backyard in town. My daughter, watching through the storm door, giggles as her short-legged beagle mix works out that her best option is to keep to the paths I’ve shoveled to the bird feeders. Meanwhile, 50 house sparrows chitter disapprovingly at a safe distance from the roof of the neighbor’s garage.

I’ve a problem with those sparrows that I’m at a loss for how to address. The birds, or more to the point the feeders they frequent, call into question the things I value about nature and why I value them. My quandary turns on the question: Do I prefer house sparrows dead or alive and what should I do about that?

Mao Zedong’s plan for transforming China from an agrarian economy to one of the world’s most industrialized societies involved a number of draconian measures that restructured the day-to-day existence of the country’s many millions. One of his first actions was the Four Pests Program designed to eliminate rats, mosquitos, flies and sparrows as disseminators of disease and destroyers of crops.

Mao’s “sparrow” was the Eurasian tree sparrow which, like the closely related house sparrows in my backyard, was one of the most abundant birds in the country. It was widely viewed as an agricultural pest for the grain it ate and despoiled with its wastes. His Great Sparrow Campaign mobilized the entire country, from school children to grandparents, to eliminate the birds (which he called public animals of capitalism) by any available means.

One of the most effective community measures was to bang on pots so insistently that the birds feared to alight on a branch to rest. The plan was enormously successful, keeping the sparrows flying until they dropped dead from the sky with exhaustion. The Polish embassy, however, refused Chinese requests to enter its grounds to roust out the many sparrows that had taken refuge there. Two days later, the diplomats had to use shovels to clear the premises of dead birds.

But here’s the twist. Like many birds that feed on seeds as adults, the sparrows switch to energy-rich insects when feeding their young. With virtually all sparrows killed off in the spring, populations of plant-eating insects exploded that summer. Along with deforestation, misuse of pesticides and numerous other mismanagement problems, the Great Sparrow Campaign helped lead to the Great Famine.

Paser domesticus, the house sparrow (in the US, sometimes called the English sparrow) initially lived in Eurasia, North Africa and the Middle East but human introductions have made it the most widely distributed of all bird species. Nicholas Pike, a museum director in Brooklyn, is credited with the first successful introduction of the species to North America in 1853 although he was by no means alone in his efforts. Over the next several decades sparrow clubs sprang up across the country.

But by the 1870s, the house sparrow had also picked up its enemies and “Sparrow Wars,” spirited debates between its detractors and defenders, became a form of public entertainment covered in the papers. By the turn of the century, public opinion had fallen against them; in 1903 William Dawson, author of The Birds of Ohio, wrote “Without question the most deplorable event in the history of ornithology was the introduction of the English Sparrow.”

The aptly named house sparrow, more than any other bird, prefers to live in our proximity. They love the grain left behind by threshers and beside the granary; they nest in our barns, under our eaves and in the “O” of the Kohl’s marquee at the mall.

This by itself isn’t so bad but those of us with a fondness for cavity-nesting bluebirds, purple martins and tree swallows typically harbor a special animosity for the bird. It’s a highly aggressive, early breeding cavity-nester that will not only drive off nesting bluebirds and swallows but destroy their eggs and nestlings.

It’s a garrulous, highly social creature with a voracious appetite that in winter can empty a bird feeder in nothing flat and drive off other birds.

Unlike our friends living on the outskirts of town whose feeders teem with a variety of birds, we get a few juncos, the occasional finch and downy woodpecker…and dozens of house sparrows. I’m a biologist and I savor the wonder of all living things. The house sparrow is a remarkable, intriguing life form and also the deadly enemy of some of the country’s most appealing native birds.

Ken Baker is a retired professor of biology and environmental studies. If you have a natural history topic you would like Dr. Baker to consider for an upcoming column, please email your idea to fre-newsdesk@gannett.com.