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Reading Test 43
A survivor's story
One native bird in New Zealand that has managed to survive the introduction of non-native species
As an island country with a fauna dominated by birds, New Zealand was once home to an owl species which is now extinct, the laughing owl. Named for its distinctive cry, this bird was widespread throughout the islands when European settlers arrived in the middle of the 19th century and it remained in good numbers for some years thereafter. Where other native birds suffered from predation by the Polynesian rat, the laughing owl turned the tables and adapted its diet to include the rodent. It was also capable of catching and killing the other New Zealand owl, the morepork, and even larger birds, such as the weka. However, the laughing owl was wiped out around the beginning of the 20th century. Its demise caused by specimen collectors, habitat changes, and non-native predators including cats and stoats. Surprisingly, it is the smaller owl, the morepork, that has managed to survive until this day.
Speckled dark brown, with yellow eyes and long tails, they are around 29 centimeters long from head to tail and 175 grams in weight. Moreporks have fringes on the edge of their feathers, so they can fly almost silently and not alert potential prey. They have acute hearing and their large eyes are very sensitive to light.
Moreporks nest in tree hollows, in clumps of plants, or in cavities among rocks and roots, in the wild, moreporks usually start nesting in October, although zoo specimens have been recorded nesting in midwinter, possibly stimulated by an ample food supply. The female lays up to three white eggs, which she incubates for 20 to 30 days. During this time, she rarely hunts, and the male brings food to her. Once the chicks hatch, she stays mainly on the nest until the young owls are fully feathered. When hatched, chicks are covered in light grey down, and have their eyes closed. The eyes do not open until the eighth day after hatching. They can fly at around 35 days.
By day, moreporks sleep in roosts. By night, they hunt a variety of animals—mainly large invertebrates including scarab and huhu beetles, moths, caterpillars and spiders. They also take small birds and mice. They can find suitable food in pine forests as well as native forest. A morepork uses its sharp talons to catch or stun its prey, which it then carries away in its bill. Moreporks are clever hunters, and birds such as robins, grey warblers and fantails can end up as their prey. In the day, these small birds sometimes mob drowsy moreporks and chase them away from their roosts. They force the sleepy predators to search for a more peaceful spot.
Moreporks have proved to be gregarious hosts. Scientists trying to establish a population of plovers on Motuora island in New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf were mystified as to why only two birds survived out of 75 placed there. The culprits turned out to be five pairs of moreporks that ate or chased away the new arrivals.
Although moreporks are still considered to be relatively common, it is likely that numbers are in gradual decline due to predation and loss of habitat. As the female is a hole-nester, she is vulnerable to predators such as stoats and possums during the breeding season, and eggs and chicks will also be at risk from rats. The use of pesticides is another possible threat to the owls though not a direct one. As moreporks are at the top of the food chain, they could be affected by an accumulative poison by consuming prey that has ingested poison.
The New Zealand Department of Conservation is taking steps to ensure the preservation of New Zealand’s only native owl. The department is involved in measuring the population of moreporks and has put transmitters on a number of birds to determine survival and mortality. As well as being New Zealand’s only native owl, the morepork has symbolic and spiritual importance, so in monitoring the birds it is hoped that the morepork will continue to survive and thrive.
At dusk, the melancholy sound of the morepork can be heard in forests and parks as it calls to other moreporks and claims territory. Its Māori name (ruru) echoes its two-part cry. In the tradition of the Māori people of New Zealand, the morepork, or ruru, was often seen as a careful guardian. A number of sayings referred to the bird’s alertness. As a bird of the night, it was associated with the spirit world. Moreporks were believed to act as messengers to the gods in the heavens, flying along spiritual paths in the sky. They were the mediums used to communicate with the gods. The occasional high, piercing call of the morepork signified bad news, but the lower-pitched and more common ‘ruru’ call heralded good news.
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Ideal Homes
New ideas and some old ones
A
The traditional kampung houses of Malaysia do not need air-conditioning. Built on stilts and with steep roofs, they are year-round ventilation. The raised structure ensures a cooling breeze comes up through the floorboards, while the high roof acts as a chimney to release hot air. The airtight, concrete boxes of modern city construction, in contrast, are heat traps, says Muhammad Peter Davis of University Putra Malaysia. He has calculated that typical modern Malaysian houses are 5°C hotter than the air outside. The builders of kampung houses ‘had no knowledge of modern science or engineering but they came up with the perfect design,’ says Davis.
B
This story of ancient architectural sophistication and modern insanity is repeated around the world. In the name of modernity, people have thrown away architecture designed to cope with the environment in which they live, and adopted house designs originating from colder, northern environments, where the idea is to keep heat in.
C
Once, the aim of architectural modernists was to build structures that kept nature out and to replace it with air-conditioning. Now they are learning that they cannot do that effectively. Slowly, they are seeing the benefit of working with nature, rather than against it. In California, they probably use more power for air-conditioning than anywhere else on Earth. According to Arthur Rosenfeld from the University of California, what California needs is white paint. If Los Angeles painted its roofs white, planted trees to shade buildings, and changed light-colored paving, it could reduce city temperatures by 3°C and cut the annual air-conditioning bill by US $170 million a year.
D
Modern buildings are greedy in their use of energy. Much is made of the contribution of transportation to global warming, though its emissions of greenhouse gases are, globally, transportation is responsible for just 22 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions. The building sector is responsible for 31 per cent, mostly the result of heating and air-conditioning systems. In developing countries, where demand for electricity for buildings is rising by 5 per cent a year, the biggest demand is for air-conditioning in modern buildings which are often designed to cope with every different climate condition.
E
Before air-conditioning, much of the Arab world kept cool through thoughtful building design. Many buildings were built according to the principles of the wind tower, a tall structure with vertical vents at the top that open in all directions to catch any passing breeze. Typically, these wind-tower buildings were made of local materials such as stone, mud brick, wood and palm-tree fronds. The buildings were inward-looking, which served the dual function of focusing attention on the courtyard, where family members spent time together, and protecting living areas from the rays of the sun.
F
Throughout the Middle East today, wind towers are often little more than museum pieces. But there are exceptions, Jordan has won awards for the architecture of a village on the shores of the Red Sea, which is designed to conserve energy. Made of rough, local stone in a traditional style, it combines the ventilation system of the wind towers for summer coolness with up-to-date heating and floors insulated to protect against the desert cold in winter.
G
Traditional building materials, like traditional building designs, are being rediscovered by those looking for low-energy solutions to the current construction needs. Clay is one such material. As the Dutch housing contractor Ru van der Ley has argued in promoting a series of clay housing projects in developing countries, clay has many benefits over its industrialised version, brick. Clay blocks cost only half as much as ordinary bricks. Clay also generates work because people can find it, mould it, bake it and work it themselves.
Two hundred clay bricks can be made with the fuel oil that makes just one ordinary brick. Moreover, clay is an excellent insulator against both cold and heat outside, and can easily be recycled.
H
But although traditional methods and materials can be revived in appropriate settings, new green, low-energy technologies are needed, especially in urban environments. The thermal insulation of homes in cold countries is an example. In 1983, Sweden adopted a national standard, requiring the country’s homes to lose no more than 60 kilowatt-hours per square meter per year. To meet that standard, windows were double-glazed, and walls and roofs insulated. Every home became a fortress against the cold air outside. Unfortunately, the rest of Europe has not followed the lead.
I
In the United States, Amory Lovins has promoted a range of low-energy technologies: ‘super windows’, for example, which let in invisible light but can be ‘tuned’ to either allow in, or reflect away, infrared solar radiation – the stuff that heats. Buildings with large expanses of window (and big energy bills) can be designed to achieve optimum temperatures.
J
As well as more efficient use of energy, the world also needs new sources of renewable power. Solar energy is being put into the developing world, in villages often far from electricity grids. The world’s biggest solar power installation and underway in the Philippines, in 2001, where a project commenced to install solar panels for 400,000 people in 150 villages. Such projects are demonstrating that countries, whether developing or developed, no longer need huge national grids to supply electricity. Every home can do its own thing with the help of a solar panel and a storage battery.
K
Houses, of course, are more than machines for living in. They are social and psychological spaces, too. Future houses may not look exactly like kampungs or wind towers or any other traditional models. But to work for us and for our environment, they will have to suit us as well as these traditional forms did.
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A review of conformity and some of the studies that have been done on it
During your childhood, there will have been some kind of craze which affected all the people in your school. It may have been to do with a particular toy or possibly a must-have item of clothing. It may have been something as simple as a type of pen or as expensive as an electronic games console. Fashion designers, toy manufacturers and anyone else involved in the retail trade love conformity. Set up a craze, especially in the young and everyone will go for it. In fact, it’s an ideal way to sell huge quantities of merchandise. The levels of conformity in consumerism are phenomenal. When you actually stand back and consider how easily we are persuaded that having certain items is the only way we can ensure peace of mind, you see what an important concept conformity is.
Conformity has been described as “yielding to group pressure” (Crutchfield1962). However, this implies that other people put pressure on us to make us conform and this is not always the case. A better definition is given by Aronson (1976) who said it was a “changing in a person’s behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or group of people”. This would make more sense, as often the pressure we feel is imagined. The person or group he refers to would have to be important to us at the time, regardless of their status.
There has been considerable research on conformity. One of the first studies looked at the answers people gave when asked to estimate the number of beans in a bottle (Jennes, 1932). If you have ever entered a ‘guess the number’ competition, you probably looked at the previous estimates made and based your judgement on what other people had guessed. This is more or less what happened in Jennes’ study. First of all, he asked the respondents to give their own estimates, and then asked them to decide a group estimate. Finally, he asked them alone again and discovered that they had stayed with the group answer.
Probably the most famous study on conformity was undertaken by Asch (1951) when he created a situation where many of his subjects gave answers which were blatantly untrue, rather than contradict the people they were with. He did this by getting his subject to sit round a table with six stooges (colleagues of the experimenter) so that the subject was second to last. He showed them all a large card which had three lines of different lengths drawn on it, labelled A B and C. He then gave them a card with a single line and asked them to match this in terms of length to one of the lines A, B or C.
The stooges gave untrue responses in a number of the trials and the subjects were left in the situation where their reported what they saw with their own eyes or conformed to the norm of the group. When the results were assessed, Asch found that in one out of every three trials where the wrong answer was given, the subject gave the same wrong answer as the stooges. This led to an average level of conformity of 32 per cent. Asch interviewed his subjects after the trials to try to find out why they conformed to an answer which was so obviously wrong. Most of them said that they did not want to cause problems within the group, although they falsified the answer when they did give wrong answers it made them anxious. (Asch found that when there was just one other person present who did not go along with the majority, no matter how many others there were, it was sufficient to make the subject give the right answer.)
Kelman (1953) outlined three processes which can explain social conformity. The first is compliance where subjects go along with the crowd to prevent any in-group hostility or bad feeling and to maintain group harmony. However, they do not change their own private belief. If we look back to the Asch study, we can see that the subjects were simply complying with the demands of the experimental situation but hadn’t actually internalised the group’s norms. They agreed in public, but dissented in private. In a process known as internalization, subjects do actually see the view of the group as the more valid one. They may be able to do this, for example, by convincing themselves that their eyesight is poor. Sometimes, however, subjects actually seem to change their beliefs because they want to become more like their heroes. If they really want to become part of an in-group, they will start to identify with that group and take on the group’s values and beliefs, even if they are different to their own. Kelman calls this identification. It frequently happens with teenagers who want to become more like their peer group in order to be accepted, and suddenly seem to go against all the values and beliefs of their parents.
So why is it that we have to conform? Some people feel confident most of the time, have high self-esteem and do not have to go along with the majority. For most of us, though, how confident we feel varies from day to day, depending on the situation we are in, and this can influence behaviour.
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