CHINA:China is breeding a crack squadron of starlings to combat a plague of locusts that has destroyed thousands of square kilometres of pasture in the far western province of Xinjiang.
The insects ruin more than three million hectares of pasture annually and the plan is to raise starlings in artificial nests to create a special "air force" to wipe out the locusts, the Xinhua news agency reported. "Damage to pasture would fall by 70 per cent if the squadrons were formed, saving 30 million yuan (€2.9 million) in the first year," said a local expert on locust control, Li Jun.
China has been battered by extreme weather this year. Hundreds of people have been washed away by flooding, while many have been killed by lightning and landslides. Heatwaves and droughts have also taken their toll, and the government concedes that global warming is at least partially responsible.
The catastrophic weather has given rise to a number of almost biblical plagues. Last month flooding on a lake as part of a dam-building project saw hundreds of millions of marauding rats overrun eastern areas of China.
In Xinjiang, experts dealt with a similar plague of rodents in May using trained wolves, eagles and foxes. The unorthodox methods of addressing scourges of locusts, rats and other pests are very much in the mould of Mao Zedong's campaign against the "Four Harms" during the "Great Leap Forward" in the 1950s, which targeted rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes.
Citizens were given strict instructions to kill the four species and that campaign became famous because the efforts to control both earthbound and flying vermin involved banging pots and pans to scare sparrows into flight and have them eventually drop to earth dead from exhaustion. Sparrows, included on Mao's hate list because of their taste for grain, were eventually rehabilitated because without them, locusts thrived.