IELTS Reading Test 36

Saving the Bittern

A The bittern, a British waterbird, does not have a good record as far as survival is concerned. By 1886, habitat destruction and other pressures had pushed it close to extinction. Fortunately, it recovered a decade later, and in 1950 the numbers of male bitterns rose to a peak of about 70. By the 1980s, however, it was clear that the bird was in trouble again. The bittern needs extensive wet reedbeds to survive, and long periods of drainage, pollution and lack of management had destroyed most of its habitat. By 1997, it again faced imminent extinction. To prevent this, the British government set up a plan for the bittern, aiming to establish a population of 50 males by 2010. However, this target was reached six years early, a rate of recovery faster than anyone had dared hope for. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) now claims the bittern as one of Britain’s greatest wildlife success stories, since figures reveal that the number of these rare birds has increased fivefold in just seven years.

B Bitterns have feathers that help them to conceal themselves and a shy nature; they usually remain hidden within the cover of reedbed vegetation. Our first challenge was to develop standard methods to monitor their numbers. The booming call of the male bittern is its most distinctive feature during the breeding season, and we developed a method to count them using the sound patterns unique to each individual. This not only allowed us to estimate local survival of males from one year to the next.

C Our first direct understanding of what breeding bitterns require in their ideal habitat came from comparisons of reedbed sites that had lost their male birds with those that retained them. This research showed that bitterns had been retained in reedbeds where the natural process of drying out had been slowed through management. Based on this work, broad recommendations on how to manage and rehabilitate reedbeds for bitterns were made, and funding was provided through a European Union (EU) wildlife fund to manage 13 sites within the core breeding range.

D To refine these recommendations and provide fine-scale, quantitative habitat prescriptions on the bitterns’ preferred feeding habitat, we started radio-tracking male bitterns on the RSPB’s Minsmere and Leighton Moss reserves. This showed clear preferences for feeding in the wetter reedbed areas, particularly within reed next to larger open pools. The average home range sizes of the male bitterns we followed (about 20 hectares) provided a good indication of the area of reedbed necessary when managing or creating habitat for this species. Female bitterns undertake all the incubation and care of the young, so it was important to understand their requirements as well. Over the course of our research, we located 87 bittern nests and found that female bitterns preferred to nest in areas of continuous vegetation, well into the reedbed, but where water was still present during the driest part of the breeding season.

E The success of the habitat prescriptions developed from this research has been spectacular. For instance, at Minsmere, male bittern numbers gradually increased from one to ten following reedbed lowering, a management technique designed to halt the drying out process. After a low point of 11 mature males in 1997, bittern numbers in Britain responded to all the habitat management work and started to increase for the first time since 1950.

F The final phase of research involved understanding the diet, survival and dispersal of bittern chicks. To do this, we fitted small radio tags to young bittern chicks in the nest, to determine their fate through to fledging, when they begin to fly, and beyond. Many chicks did not survive to this stage, and starvation was found to be the most likely reason for their demise. The first prey fed to chicks were mainly those species penetrating into the reed edge. So, an important element of recent studies has been development of recommendations on habitat and water conditions to promote native fish populations. Once independent, radio-tagged young bitterns were found to seek out new sites during their first winter; a proportion of these would remain on new sites if the conditions were suitable. A second EU-funded project aims to provide these suitable sites in new areas. A network of 19 sites developed through this partnership project will secure a more sustainable UK bittern population with successful breeding outside of the core area, less vulnerable to chance and sea level rise.

G By 2004, the number of booming male bitterns in the UK had increased to 55. Almost all the increase occurred on those sites undertaking management based on advice from our research. While rescuing the bittern, the work has helped a range of other wetland species such as otters. Although science has been at the core of the recovery story, success has only been achieved through the trust, hard work and dedication of all the managers, owners and wardens of sites that have implemented, in some cases very drastic, management to secure the future of this wetland species in the UK.

The Placebo Effect

With the right encouragement, your mind can convince the body to heal itself!

Want to devise a new form of alternative medical treatment? No problem. Here's the recipe. As a practitioner, be warm, sympathetic, reassuring and enthusiastic. Your treatment should involve physical contact, and each session with your patients should take at least half an hour. Encourage your patients to take an active part in their treatment and understand how their disorders relate to the rest of their lives. Tell them that their own bodies possess the true power to heal. Describe your treatment in familiar words, but embroidered with a hint of mysticism: energy fields, flows, meridians, forces, auras, rhythms and the like. Oh, come off it, you're saying. Something like that couldn't possibly work, could it?

Well yes, it could—and often well enough to earn you a living. Many illness types yield to their own, so if you are lucky and administer your treatment at just the right time you'll get the credit. Some of the improvement really would be down to you—not necessarily because you'd recommended ginseng rather than chamomile tea, but because of the paradoxical force known as the placebo effect.

Placebos are treatments that have no direct effect on the body, yet still work because the patient has faith in their power to heal. Most often the term refers to a dummy pill, but it applies just as much to any device or procedure, from a sticking plaster to a crystal. The existence of the placebo effect implies that even a complete fraud could make a difference to someone's health. In fact, the placebo is a powerful part of all medical care, orthodox or otherwise, though its role is often neglected and misunderstood.

At one level, it should come as no surprise that our state of mind can influence our physiology: anger opens the superficial blood vessels of the face; sadness pumps the tear glands. But exactly how placebos work their medical magic is still largely unknown. Most of the research to date has focused on the control of pain. Here, attention has turned to the endorphins—natural substances produced in the brain that help control pain. Any of the neurochemicals involved in transmitting pain impulses or modulating them might also be involved in generating the placebo response, says Don Price, an oral surgeon at the University of Florida.

That case has been strengthened by the recent work of Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, who showed that the placebo effect can be abolished by a drug, naloxone, which blocks the effects of endorphins. Benedetti induced pain with a pressure cuff on the forearm, using morphine each time to control the pain. On the final day, without saying anything, he replaced the morphine with a saline solution. This still relieved the subjects' pain: a placebo effect. But when he added naloxone to the saline, and blocked the endorphins, the pain relief disappeared. Here was direct proof that the relief of pain by a placebo is carried out, at least in part, by these natural opiates.

Though scientists don't know exactly how placebos work, they have accumulated a fair bit of knowledge about how to trigger the effect. A London rheumatologist found that red dummy capsules made more effective painkillers than blue ones. Another found that injections were better than pills. A third discovered that two identical sugar pills a day were more effective than one. A fourth found that a tranquiliser worked better when pink, a colour more suitable for stimulants. Even branding can make a difference: Aspirin or Tylenol seem more effective than their generic equivalents.

It matters too how the treatment is delivered. Decades ago, when the major tranquiliser chlorpromazine was being introduced, a doctor in Kansas found that the more enthusiastic the doctor, the better the drug performed. A recent survey on doctors' bedside manners found that physicians who adopt a warm, friendly, reassuring manner are more effective than those who are formal and distant.

Warm, friendly and reassuring are precisely what alternative treatment is all about. Many of the ingredients of that opening recipe—the physical contact, generous time, and hints of healing power—are just the kind of things likely to impress patients. It's hardly surprising then that complementary practitioners are generally best at mobilising the placebo effect, says Arthur Kleinman, professor of social anthropology at Harvard University.