A Beijing newspaper recently reported that 118 pigeons died at a big new shopping centre after eating rat poison. What was intriguing about the story was how the pigeons came to be there in the first place - birds in public places in China usually end up getting eaten by the locals - and how people reacted.
The pigeons, it turned out, had been ordered from the Beijing Happy Wings Company to give some character to the open-air plaza of the shopping centre. And store workers and shoppers liked the idea of pigeons-as-ornament so much that they organised a memorial fund and donated money and bird seed for the surviving pigeons.
Now this is not the reaction that one might expect in China to a few dead birds. This is a country where birds of every kind are regarded first and foremost as delicacies; indeed dead pigeon is a favourite in top Beijing restaurants like the China Club, where they are served with the roasted beak in the centre of the plate.
This is a country where they say people eat everything that flies except aeroplanes. And it was in China not so long ago that people cheerfully took to the fields to make noise until all the sparrows fell from exhaustion and were killed - one of Chairman Mao's anti-pest wheezes.
But attitudes to birds have undergone a big revolution in China, as ecological awareness increased during the opening up policy. This month several Chinese cities are holding Love-the-Birds weeks, under the slogan: "Let birds share the sky with people". Promoted by the China Wildlife Conservation Association, the idea is to underline the need for wild bird protection in a country with 1,256 recorded bird species, many endangered, including nine of the world's 14 species of crane and 62 out of 200 species of pheasant.
The results have been dramatic. Beijing had only 136 different types of birds in 1990, but today has 256, according to Wang Zengnian, an expert with the Beijing Wildlife Protection Centre, who credited better education and an afforestation drive. In Beijing today one has a chance to spot, in parks once empty of wild birds, small dazzling kingfishers, cinnamon-coloured hoopoes, white wagtails, blue-grey nuthatches, little coal tits and grey-capped greenfinches.
In the provinces, where local restaurants specialise in wild birds - thrush is a favourite - people are being encouraged to switch to other dishes, and in some places the government has banned the shooting of birds for sale to restaurateurs. In southern Hunan province rare white herons and other rare species are returning after such a ban was imposed last year, according to the Xinhua news Agency, which quoted an old resident as saying, "In the past, bird cry was hardly heard here but now it is everywhere."
Bird conservation can pay, too. Wang Shiguo and his brothers planted a few acres of bamboo in south-west Sichuan Province which they intended to sell but today the family makes a good living from charging visitors who come to see the 10,000 herons which formed a colony in their bamboo forest.
Such stories abound in the Chinese media. Since the creation in Inner Mongolia of China's first-ever reserve for bustards - tall birds which prefer to walk than to fly and are on the verge of extinction - their number has increased from ten to 60. The population of ibis, an endangered species once common to China, Japan and Germany, has grown from a mere seven in 1981 to 136 as a result of environmental protection measures; two ibises recently built a nest on a mountain slope in northwest Shaanxi Province and laid two eggs and are now under state protection.
In Shanghai, construction began just this month of a large nature reserve in a wetland area to protect the habitat of millions of migrant birds flying between northeast Asia and Australia. On Monday last the government showed how serious it is about protecting birds by giving 12-year jail sentences to two men in Henan province who killed swans, a protected species, by dumping pesticide in a river to kill wild ducks and sell them for food.
As life gets better for birds, China is creating a more friendly habitat for another exotic species - bird-watchers. The Chinese resort of Beidaihe, a watering place for migrant birds, held an international bird-watching competition this month for which nearly 200 people turned up. Hong Kong has been holding such a competition for 16 years. It is called the Big Bird Race, in which participants dash around the territory trying to spot as many birds as possible within 24 hours. Last year the winner had 154 ticks, a figure which many Irish bird watchers would envy.
The upshot of the government's bird-friendly policy is that the next international conference on ornithology, the 23rd, will be held in Beijing in August 2002. This is a big deal for China as it will be the first time the conference, held roughly every four years since 1894, will be located in Asia. One trusts that for that month at least pigeon will be taken off the menu in the China Club in Beijing.