Writing competency assessment and evaluation

Writing Competency Test

Going to the Birds:

The Effect of Human Interference on Bird Survival

As a child, I loved the Sesame Street character Big Bird. He was huge but not threatening, and showed as much curiosity about the world as I did. In fact, Big Bird has been one of the most popular figures on Sesame Street since its creation, and it's no wonder. Birds have held a special spot in the hearts and minds of humans for millennia. We have kept them as pets, we have raised and hunted them for food, we have dreamed of flying among them. They have been used to symbolize wisdom, peace, and freedom. Despite this fascination, however, we often ignore them when their needs conflict with our own. Too often, the survival of a bird species rests on whether or not we care to take an interest in them at the right time. Many times this interest comes too late, or not at all.

Such was the case with the passenger pigeon. An article on Ecotopia.org describes the fall of the passenger pigeon due to "human greed and our capacity for mindless destruction." While it was once the most populous bird in North America, it was wiped to extinction within a hundred years from overhunting and the destruction of their habitat. Unfortunately, too many hunters early in the 19th century held the attitude of John James Audubon, that the birds were simply too numerous to go extinct from anything but "the gradual diminution of our forests" (qtd. In Ecotopia).

At the time, Audubon could not conceive of the disappearance of the forests and therefore could not see any real danger to the pigeon population, but he was gravely underestimating the destructive power of human greed and ignorance. While hunters cannot deny the role hands-on role that they play in the destruction of a species, developers and loggers are less likely to take the blame for extinction since it is merely an unintended consequence of their actions, not the ultimate goal. If the blood of these birds and other animals were literally on their hands the way that it is for hunters, then perhaps they would be more aware and take more responsibility for the havoc they wreak on these populations, but as it stands it is simply too easy for them to turn away from the consequences of their actions and to deny accountability.

This callousness about habitat destruction also led to the near-extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a species once strong but now so rare that it has until recently been considered legendary. In his review of Tim Gallagher's the Grail Bird, Mark Barrow attributes the disappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker to commercial logging that continued "despite the best efforts of Audubon officials" and with the full knowledge that continued clearing would make the species extinct (36). Though a few members of the species ended up surviving against incredible odds, their only hope for the future lies in the concerted efforts of bird-lovers and conservationists and in the willingness of writers like Gallagher to bring their story to the general public. There may be a future for the ivory-billed woodpecker now, but it should not take the near-annihilation of a population to make us stand up and take interest.

There are opportunities for us to change our ways. Take the example of the chicken -- a staple in the American diet and a familiar barnyard creature for children everywhere. Like Audubon, it is easy for us to fall into the attitude that the chicken is simply too ubiquitous, too entrenched in our daily lives to be threatened by our greed. Even if we protect its numbers, however, we have come very close to taking away from the chicken anything resembling its natural life. They are now born and raised in commercial farms, allowed little room to move, and force-fed antibiotics and far too much food in hopes of fattening them. What we are creating is not a chicken, but a cog in the economic wheel and a line in the bank ledger. But there are some people recently who recognize this, and who are bucking the system.