On Saturday 13 December 1958, the People’s Republic of China declared war on a bird. Mobilisation was total: 600 million enlisted for the fight. Their target was a tiny songbird, between five and six inches long: the Eurasian tree sparrow. It might seem like overkill, writes Stephen Moss in his history of human-avian relations, but in the eyes of China’s leaders the sparrows more than deserved it. An estimated 1.5m tonnes of grain disappeared down the gullets of said feathered gourmets each year. China was short on food – and short on patience. Peace was never an option.
Such extreme enmity, Moss reassures readers, is historically an exception, not a rule. Not that there’s much of a rule to be found in our millennia of coexistence – apart from how consistently we get birds wrong. Scavenging habits – and a certain native glamour – helped ravens coast into human mythologies as helpful companions across neolithic Eurasia. But ravens aren’t interested in us at all. Self-absorbed and self-interested, they root through rubbish heaps and tear at corpses with the same eerie grace. Another of Moss’s 10 test cases, the bald eagle, is emblematic of freedom, courage and the American way. Yet in reality, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out to his fellow founding fathers, bald eagles are cowardly parasites. For an alternative national symbol, Jefferson proposed a bird known for courage and faithfulness: the turkey.
