Some years ago, after I gave a talk on conservation in Salado, Texas, a retired biochemist told me that Mao Zedong had decided birds were stealing too much grain in China, so he ordered all citizens to go outside and bang pots continuously until the birds, repeatedly flying up in alarm, fell to the ground from exhaustion, whereupon they could be captured, killed, and eaten. Thus was China stripped of nearly all its birds. Whereupon the insect population swelled out of control, spoiling or devouring more crops than the birds had ever consumed. This news helped explain something that the renowned nature essayist Edward Hoagland once told me. Sent to China by a magazine to write about the status of wildlife in that country, worrying that his report would be dismal, Hoagland was relieved to see, on the first day of his visit, a cormorant flying over the Yangtse River. He thought maybe the status of wildlife was not as bleak as he had feared. But the cormorant was the only bird he saw during ten days of travel in China.