Sparrows for Dinner
Considered the king of wildfowl and a prized delicacy by hunters and chefs respectively, the ortolan bunting is captured in the wild, roasted, and eaten whole. Alain Darroze, a well-known French chef, writes in his 2001 book Hands Off my Ortolan:
The ortolan is the best kind of fat there is. It’s a bulimic bird that you place in a cage 8 inches high, in the dark, with unlimited food and drink for 18 to 24 days ... The bird doubles in volume. You then kill it by barely holding it in your hands. Once feathered, it is cooked for 20 minutes in the oven.
The luxury was favored so greatly that France’s ortolan population fell 30% between 1997 and 2007 — and that’s only a ten-year period. Even without this threat, ortolan buntings were vulnerable across their entire range, just like many migratory grassland-inhabitants. Luckily, hunting and eating these birds is now illegal. Although laws were created to control this in 1999, only in 2007 did France strictly enforce them. Today, the ortolan population has rebounded, but many French people still don’t understand why these conservation laws are necessary. “It is part of our culture which is disappearing,” one complained. “The ortolan isn’t in danger. That’s just a strategy by the ecologists to prevent hunting.”
A different and quite taxonomically unrelated sparrow, the tree sparrow of east Asia, has an even sadder story to tell. During his rule in communist China, Mao ordered all tree sparrows killed, saying that they ate too much grain intended for the people. The people followed his lead, going as far as waving flags around sparrow habitat so that the birds could not perch to rest. The sparrows underwent a massive and sharp decline, and at a local level were in danger of extinction. Although Mao had achieved his goal, the elimination of the tree sparrow left insects without a natural predator. The insect populations in grasslands and agricultural fields soared, creating a huge famine that killed millions of people.
An Ortolan Bunting
A Eurasian Tree Sparrow
What Now?
Even if one is not an ortolan hunter or a communist ruler, humanity has wreaked havoc to the natural world that birds depend upon. Scientists are turning up more and more birds gone down the void of extinction: in 2012, two species of hawk-owls in the Philippines; in 2014, the Sulawesi streaked flycatcher, a melodious singer hanging on in patches of forest left by farmers; and in 2015, the Sichuan bush warbler of central China’s lush mountainous provinces. Without an urgent conservation strategy, many of the North American species we know and love may vanish.
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