Summary Response #2

A Threat to Whooping Crane

In the REDORBIT NEWS (2008) article, “Wind Farms Threaten Endangered Whooping Crane,” the author states that wind farms are the new causes that bring about death or injury of North American whooping crane. First, there are a lot of wind farms around their routes of migration. They create large wind turbines and cranes can crash into them when they land or take off during migration. The main cause of death for the whooping cranes is crashing into power lines. If cranes are safe, their migration stopover habitats can be lost. Second, now wind farms are growing, and many employees of the companies don’t want to see injured crane anymore. However wind farms are required for clean and renewable electricity in the U.S now. Therefore they are supposed to increase more in the route of migration. Finally, whooping crane is an endangered species. Increasing the number of wind farms can cause extinction, so it should be stopped. Today how to protect whooping crane from wind farms’ impact is discussed.

In the world, there are endangered birds for various reasons, for example air pollution, climate changes and loss of habitat. Now we have a new reason for extinction of birds like whooping crane that is threatened by wind farms. Our activities which affect wild lives are increasing more and more, and the activities are important for our lives. So it’s difficult to solve this problem. We have to know reasons for extinction and compare the importance of birds’ lives with that of our high quality lives in solving the problem.

First of all, we should know what we do to birds’ lives. Today all we know is that increasing human activities threaten them greatly and some species of birds have died out already. We usually don’t notice that birds are threatened until the problem is serious, because we don’t kill them directly. A wind farm wouldn’t seem to be dangerous to birds, but in fact, it takes their habitat away and extinction results from it. They rarely die out in nature without our activities, so it should be thought that we kill them. By thinking like that, our thoughts for birds' extinction should change.

Second, we have to consider whether high quality lives are more important than birds’ lives. We cause factors which bring about threat of extinction of birds one after another to have high quality lives. In fact, they make our lives developed and we are accustomed to using them, so it’s difficult to live without them now. And we still now try to create more convenient lives. However, on the other hand, birds fall victim to our greed. It’s a big problem for wildlife because the extinction of a kind of animal can collapse another animal’s ecosystem. We need to consider what happens and precede safety of their lives before we think about developing our lives.

Finally, protecting birds and helping them recover from crisis of extinction are our responsibilities. We live with wild animals in this world, so it’s impossible for us not to be concerned with them. In addition, only humans can collapse their ecosystems contrary to nature, so we need to care about them. However we have threatened them already. Now we have to try to help birds as soon as possible and pay attention to others. They are all things we can do to make up for their sacrifice.

In conclusion, human activities which make our lives convenient can threaten birds’ lives. This problem has already been serious, and it’s very hard to solve it because the cause of the problem is our activities. However we have only one choice which is to prevent factors from threatening them even if the factors make our lives useful. It’s difficult to precede bird’s lives, but birds can live freely by our effort to care about them.

Reference

REDORBIT NEWS. (2008, February 29). Wind Farms Threaten Endangered Whooping Crane. Retrieved October 28, 2008, from http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=1275521