
A law was quickly passed in 1959 requiring Chinese citizens to participate in targeting sparrows.
People hit pots and pans together to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests all over the country. Nests were destroyed and any bird found was killed, forcing them out of their natural habitat, searching for safer areas. Sparrows were eradicated.
Sparrows worldwide are natural predators of many insects, including crop-damaging locusts.
Locusts didn’t make Mao’s pest list since the sparrows consumed them along with the grain, controlling the insect population. Removing sparrows as the predator in its ecosystem would soon prove devastating for China.
By 1960, locusts overtook rice crops, limiting the food supply and initiating a famine for the Chinese.
Numbers vary, with the official number of lives lost from the Chinese government placed at 15 million. Some scholars, however, estimate that the fatalities were as high as 45 or even 78 million
There was also a major drought in 1960. Many historians believe the effects of weather events were exaggerated to minimize public concern with policy failures.
The sparrow eradication stands out as a significant contributing factor to the severity of the famine.
China ultimately imported 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to recover the species within the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
https://www.historydefined.net/how-killing-sparrows-led-to-one-of-the-greatest-famines-in-history/
This tragic lesson should teach us that maintaining healthy populations of birds that consume insects is important to support sufficient food production for survival of humans.
Since 1970, 93 million white-throated sparrows have been lost in North America!
So what happens as food production becomes stifled and insects increase as bird populations continue to decline in North America? Can’t we just use increased chemical controls?
Here’s the problem. Birds, and especially passerines like sparrows, have an extremely varied diet including various grains, insects, snails, frogs, worms and small vertebrates. As these birds decline in numbers, the undesirable components of their diet will proliferate in our environment. Attempting additional chemical control will require multiple chemical agents, multiple applications and all the associated side effects and costs. And chemical controls typically lose effectiveness over time. And effective chemicals may not be in existence.
The question remains. Why do we allow valuable habitats to be degraded and even destroyed (such as unreplaced tree removals) to build housing that most people cannot afford? Doesn’t it make more sense to preserve habitats for all their benefits including stable food production and biodiversity?