Do sparrows chirp in a Chinese dialect in Thailand?

In the Thailand blog edition of May 30, 2022, there was a nice article about the mischievous sparrows, those cheeky rascals in the author's garden. He is delighted and enjoys it.

Let's take a closer look at the Thai sparrow… because it was very close that there were almost no sparrows to be found in all of Asia. And a subsequent question: do the sparrows in Thailand all understand each other?

Note: in the Dutch language you can now address the sparrow as 'he' or 'she'. After all, our WNT (Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal, an officially recognized body for Dutch and Flemish administrations) prescribes 'm/f'. In the Netherlands, the sparrow would rather be referred to as a 'he', in Flanders rather as a 'she'. Take a look at yourself…

However, I am not yet aware of whether gender-neutral specimens have also been observed among the sparrows, because then a linguistic problem would arise. And should I call the sparrow, for example, 'the sparrow – it chirps', or 'their chirps' or something like that. Fortunately, we're not there yet.

Biologists would have it that the sparrow originated as a species in the Middle East ten thousand years ago, when the Neolithic people there scattered the first grass seeds (aka evolved into well-known wheat, barley, corn) into the soil and harvested them as grain. This is known as the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Hence the presence of available food for the sparrow. Hence his covenant with man. And hence its systematic geographic distribution to both east and west.

The sparrow has a phenomenal adaptability. Only the Amazon basin, the polar regions and Central Africa are among the few places where he is absent.

The sparrow, like the dog (aka domesticated wolf), appears to be a 'culture follower' from the start, i.e. it follows human communities, eats spilled grain in the fields and survives in bushes, hedges, meadows and holes where it is nest builds. He is a real people lover.

But surprisingly, the writer of the article may have Chinese migrants (6th 7th generation??) sitting in his garden in Thailand, judging by his remark that they are quite noisy… 555. Why?

Well, in the years 1958 to 1964, large groups of 'war sparrow refugees' emigrated from China during Mao's sparrow repression and subsequent persecution and massacres by the wrought-up masses. It is possible that flights of Chinese sparrows have ended up in the gardens of Thailand.

The great enlightened leader Mao Zedong had caused a great famine in the 50s and 60s through injudicious management and was looking for a scapegoat so as not to be held accountable. He couldn't keep killing and persecuting his own people, so he came up with a brilliant plan.

He had calculated that each sparrow took about 4 kg of grain per year. He had also calculated that in one year of expelling ie killing about 1 million sparrows there would be 60 more mouths of grain. In theory that was correct.

It was a frivolous and above all rash campaign that thoroughly disrupted biodiversity in Asia. But Mao's fantasies were law in the communist utopia. Don't all the dictators in the world have a corner that leads them to absurd orders?

The red dictator launched his 'Destruction Campaign of the 4 Plagues'. That list included the rat, the fly, the mosquito… and the sparrow, which therefore does not belong on this black list of harmful animals at all.

What was the action plan? All the Chinese, from the tallest to the smallest, had to make a loud noise everywhere and at all times, chasing the sparrows and keeping them in the air until they fell dead of exhaustion. Of course, sparrows could also be killed in all kinds of other ways. Mass hysteria!

Over those six years, it is estimated that up to one billion dead or fledged sparrows will result.

Unfortunately, the side effects were equally catastrophic. Multitudes of other species of birds fell unintentionally, but also hunted, to Mao's 'Campaign of Extermination'. Biologists argue that China has still not recovered from its bird extermination campaign.

You can conclude that theDestruction Campaign of the 4 Plagues' would have paid off and saved thousands of starving Chinese people. Unfortunately, here too with disastrous but predictable consequences in second line. A second famine disaster arose when masses of locust plagues ravaged China and devoured all grain… due to the absence of natural enemies, the most important of which was the sparrow.

Short-sighted as he was, Mao had failed to take into account the inevitable and dire consequences for the environment.

In the Netherlands and Belgium, the sparrow has been on the 'red' list of endangered species since 2004. The population would already be halved. There are some known reasons for this. It would be the 'usutu virus' that causes death, also in blackbirds. But the rampant construction frenzy with concrete cities that are increasing in size and leave little chance for quiet nests in hedges and bushes is also a culprit.

And finally: what about those Thai sparrows chirping and singing in Chinese?

In the 80s, the biological world in Europe, the US and Canada launched scientific research into the language of birds. Internationally, they chose the blackbird as an object of study. The studies have shown that blackbirds in Europe whistled differently than in the New World or Australia. They used different tone, melody and frequencies. But they follow our Western tone division in do-re-mi.

Sound recordings of Canadian blackbirds were offered to British, German and French blackbirds and they did not respond or reacted with confusion. More extensive research concluded that the reverse was also the case, with even differences between Canadian and American blackbird groups. Their singing has to do with the background sounds of the habitat they live in, city-countryside, blackbird babies learn to sing the language like their parents do, so variants can arise, just like our dialects.

In the Netherlands, research must be known of great tits and crows and yes – you guessed it – a Zeeland great tit is placed between peers in Delfzijl and the Delfzijl great tits look bewildered, bewildered and bewildered. Birds are no different from humans… 555!

When you hear sparrows on your next walk in your garden in Wiang Pa Pao, Lang Sua, Nong Rua or Det Udom, you may ask yourself whether they are chirping in Chinese or in the pure native Thai? In the first case, it is the survivors of Mao and his madness that you hear about, migrants who flew over and sought asylum in Thailand in the early XNUMXs.