Many years ago on TV - this would have been in the UK - I saw a piece of black and white film footage possbly from the 50s or 60s that appeared to showed a village, or larger area, in country possibly China, Korea or Vietnam (?) that had a remarkable way of dealing with a wild birdpest problem, It appears that they got everyone, and I mean everyone. to go out and make noise and commotion all at the same time to keep them in the for long enough to see birds fall from the sky seemingly with exhaustion.
I remember seeing the clip and villagers banging pots and pans etc to disturb the birds with the dead and dying birds falling to the ground.
Am I misinterpreting this? Does this ring any bells with anyone?
In the 50’s Chairman Mao decided to wage war on pests in China, and declared war on rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows (!?).
They did exactly like you describe, chase the sparrows around till they died of exhaustion. I’ve seen old footage of people banging pots and pans and trucks full of dead sparrows.
Then the locusts came, and there were no sparrows to eat them…
Thanks for the replies. That was what I saw. Maybe there is the film somewhere on the net. There’s a little more here: http://zonaeuropa.com/20061130_1.htm
An article in The New York Times claims that up to 18m birds were killed before Mao was persuaded to reprieve the sparrow and wage war on the bedbug instead.
My thought at the time of seeing it was maybe they had some kind of famine or their crops failed so it was a novel way of getting an emergency food supply. Not sure what sparrow tastes like though.