“Pigeons are now one of the greatest threats for airplanes,” Huang Jianjun, an airport manager, was quoted as saying by the paper. “It is with urgency that local authorities ban pigeon breeding, feeding and flying anywhere near the airport.”

This article reminds me of a story once told to me in my early days in China. A couple of us had wondered why up to that time (circa 1989) we had never seen a bird flying in the sky or singing in the trees (for that matter we had never seen a dog or cat either) in China. One of out Chinese teachers told us that birds had been “ruled” to be bad for society and so a campaign to “eliminate” them was instituted where people would bang on pans and whatever to keep the birds flying until they were too tired to fly and dropped down dead. We never believed our teacher…figuring she was just trying to pull the wool over our foreign eyes but after reading this article…teacher’s words might ring truer then we knew.

Beijing Airport Tackles Pigeon Problem