Comment by metalman

yup, and if we read the same account, then China is still suffering from a the loss of song birds. From observing song birds, especialy in winter, they are very busy eating, dormant insects and there egg clusters, and most of the over wintering birds are doing this, up too crows.Colder weather pushes the birds to seak out the higher energy food from insects, rather than seeds and plants, and the cold weather will kill certain types of pests in the ground.So warmer weather and no birds did kill more Chinese, than the Japanese in ww2. Its one of the bleaker demonstrations of the law of unintended consiquences. Something similar happened in India, when they killed all the snakes,(cobras), which used to keep the now out of control rat population in check. The disease and food destruction caused by rats, is orders of magnitude more deadly and costly than the snakes ever were.And now there are spoty efforts to rehabilitate the snakes reputation and the place they occupied for millenia.