JOY OF SPRING AIR: 7/8:Ten Birds That Changed the World by Stephen Moss (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Birds-That-Changed-World/dp/1541604466
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
1917 Dodo
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSi in the world. I'm John Bachelor with the very generous Stephen Moss, |
| 0:08.8 | the BBC producer and author of 10 birds that changed the world. |
| 0:13.0 | This next story took my breath away. |
| 0:16.0 | It's about something humble called the sparrow. |
| 0:20.0 | We have sparrows everywhere. |
| 0:21.0 | They sing. This is the tree sparrow and it's the tree sparrow of Asia, the |
| 0:28.6 | tree sparrow of China, the People's Republic of China. In December of 1958, Mao Tseitung, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, declared |
| 0:39.5 | four vermines must be wiped out. |
| 0:42.0 | Rodents, mosquitoes, flies, and the tree sparrow. |
| 0:48.0 | What follows is astonishing. |
| 0:51.0 | Stephen, I want to make sure that Rod rodents, mosquitoes, flies, and sparrows. |
| 0:55.0 | They're not the same thing. |
| 0:57.0 | But focusing on the sparrow, what kind of sparrow? |
| 1:00.0 | What did it look like? |
| 1:01.0 | It's very, it's bird actually found in Britain. |
| 1:03.9 | We are used to the house sparrow, which you of course have in the United States |
| 1:07.4 | because it was brought there by mistake. |
| 1:09.6 | This is a close relative to that. |
| 1:11.2 | It's not related to the American sparrows really. It's a seed-eating |
| 1:14.6 | bird. It was very common in China in rural and urban areas. Now what you have to remember |
| 1:20.7 | about Chairman Mao is even compared to other dictators like |
| 1:25.6 | Stalin and Hitler and dare I say certain former US presidents. |
... |
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