7/8: Ten Birds That Changed the World Hardcover – by Stephen Moss (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
7/8: Ten Birds That Changed the World Hardcover – by Stephen Moss (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Birds-That-Changed-World/dp/1541604466
For the whole of human history, we have lived alongside birds. We have hunted and domesticated them for food; venerated them in our mythologies, religions, and rituals; exploited them for their natural resources; and been inspired by them for our music, art, and poetry.
In Ten Birds That Changed the World, naturalist and author Stephen Moss tells the gripping story of this long and intimate relationship through key species from all seven of the world’s continents. From Odin’s faithful raven companions to Darwin’s finches, and from the wild turkey of the Americas to the emperor penguin as potent symbol of the climate crisis, this is a fascinating, eye-opening, and endlessly engaging work of natural history.
1914 Redwinged Blackbird
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Y'all ready for something new. |
| 0:02.0 | Oh, you thought it was just burgers and fries. |
| 0:06.0 | They got more flavors than you taste it or you heard in your life. |
| 0:09.0 | Yup it. |
| 0:10.0 | It ain't only restaurants anymore. |
| 0:12.0 | We can go bananas at the grocery store. |
| 0:14.4 | I'm a bad girl for my take-out battle. What you need do? I could cop a taco pedal. |
| 0:20.0 | And my sushi train is on loop. When you you're this slick what you gonna do. |
| 0:25.0 | Did somebody say just it? This is a series of CBS In The World. I'm John Bachelor with the very generous Stephen Moss, the BBC producer and author of 10 birds that changed the world. This next story took my breath away. |
| 0:46.5 | It's about something humble called the sparrow. We have sparrows everywhere. They sing. |
| 0:55.8 | This is the tree sparrows everywhere. They sing. This is the tree sparrow and it's the tree sparrow of Asia, the tree sparrow of China, the People's Republic of China. In |
| 1:01.6 | December of 1958, Mao Tse Tung, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, declared |
| 1:09.3 | four vermines must be wiped out. Rodents, mosquitoes, flies, and the tree sparrow. |
| 1:17.8 | What follows is astonishing. |
| 1:20.8 | Stephen, I want to make sure that Rodents, mosquitoes, flies, and sparrows, they're not the same thing. |
| 1:27.0 | But focusing on the sparrow, what kind of sparrow, what did it look like? |
| 1:31.0 | It's very, it's a bird found in Britain we we are used to the house |
| 1:35.0 | sparrow which you of course have in the United States because it was brought there by |
| 1:38.2 | mistake this is a close relative to that it's not related to the American sparrows really it's a seed-eating |
| 1:44.4 | bird it was very common in China in rural and urban areas now what you have to |
| 1:50.2 | remember about Chairman Mao is even compared to other dictators like |
| 1:55.4 | Stalin and Hitler and dare I say certain former US presidents. One of the problems with Mao is that he had absolute power. |
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