S8 Ep149: 7/8. The Snowy Egret, The Emperor Penguin, and the Climate Canary — Steven Moss — Moss describes the beautiful Snowy Egret, nearly driven to extinction during 19th-century "plumage wars," when its feathers, priced equivalently to gold, were harvested for

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John Batchelor

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4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

7/8. The Snowy Egret, The Emperor Penguin, and the Climate Canary — Steven Moss — Moss describes the beautiful Snowy Egret, nearly driven to extinction during 19th-century "plumage wars," when its feathers, priced equivalently to gold, were harvested for women's millinery fashion. Moss emphasizes that the resulting systemic cruelty toward birds catalyzed women to establish conservation organizations including the Audubon Society. Moss identifies climate change as the current existential threat, exemplified by the Emperor Penguin, facing projected 98% extinction by 2100 due to habitat loss from sea ice decline. Moss characterizes the penguin, alongside migratory warblers affected by phenological mismatches with earlier insect emergence, as a "miner's canary" providing early warning of impending ecological and climate catastrophe confronting humanity.
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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBSI in the world.
0:05.0	I'm John Batchel with the very generous Stephen Moss, the BBC producer and author of Ten
0:11.5	Birds that Changed the World.
0:13.8	This next story took my breath away.
0:17.0	It's about something humble called the sparrow.
0:20.1	We have sparrows everywhere. They sing.
0:23.2	This is the tree sparrow. And it's the tree sparrow of Asia, the tree sparrow of China, the People's Republic of China.
0:31.6	In December of 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, declared four vermin's must be wiped out.
0:42.1	Rodents, mosquitoes, flies, and the tree sparrow. What follows is astonishing.
0:50.9	Stephen, I want to make sure, rodents, mosquitoes, flies flies and sparrows, 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?
1:01.5	It's a bird actually found in Britain.
1:04.0	We are used to the house sparrow, which you, of course, have in the United States, because it was brought there by mistake.
1:09.4	This is a close relative to that.
1:11.3	It's not related to the American sparrows really.
1:13.9	It's a seed-eating bird.
1:15.1	It was very common in China in rural and urban areas.
1:19.6	Now what you have to remember about Chairman Mao is even compared to other dictators
1:25.4	like Stalin and Hitler and dare I say certain former US presidents.
1:32.0	One of the problems with Mao is that he had absolute power. I mean all dictators are
1:38.0	powerful but he took it to a different level. So when he told 650 million Chinese people
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