2: 7. The Tree Sparrow: Mao's Folly and the Emu Wars AUTHOR: Stephen Moss BOOK TITLE: 10 Birds That Changed the World This excerpt details Mao's 1958 "Four Vermin" campaign targeting the Tree Sparrow. Mao ordered the sparrows killed, believing they consumed
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
7. The Tree Sparrow: Mao's Folly and the Emu Wars
BOOK TITLE: 10 Birds That Changed the World
This excerpt details Mao's 1958 "Four Vermin" campaign targeting the Tree Sparrow. Maoordered the sparrows killed, believing they consumed grain; however, because sparrows feed their young on insects, their eradication led to an insect population boom. The subsequent crop failures caused a famine that resulted in potentially 45 to 50 million deaths, making it the worst human-created disaster in history. The segment contrasts this tragedy with the "Emu Wars" in 1930s Australia, where highly adaptable Emussuccessfully defeated the Australian army.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Building a coffee business? |
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| 0:17.9 | Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more. |
| 0:25.9 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with the very generous Stephen Moss, |
| 0:28.9 | the BBC producer and author of 10 birds that changed the world. |
| 0:33.8 | This next story took my breath away. |
| 0:37.1 | It's about something humble called the sparrow. |
| 0:39.3 | We have sparrows everywhere. |
| 0:41.3 | They sing. |
| 0:43.3 | This is the tree sparrow. |
| 0:45.3 | And it's the tree sparrow of Asia, the tree sparrow of China, the People's Republic of China. |
| 0:51.3 | In December of 1958, Maut Zitung, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, declared four vermin's must be wiped out. |
| 1:02.0 | Rodents, mosquitoes, flies, and the tree sparrow. What follows is astonishing. |
| 1:10.0 | Stephen, I want to make sure, rodents mosquitoes, flies and sparrows, they're not the same thing. |
| 1:16.6 | But focusing on the sparrow, what kind of sparrow? What did it look like? |
| 1:21.6 | It's very, it's a bird that's actually found in Britain. We are used to the house sparrow, |
| 1:25.6 | which you of course have in the United States, |
| 1:31.9 | because it was brought there by mistake. This is a close relative to that. It's not related to the American sparrows, really. It's a seed-eating bird. It was very common in China, |
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