Week 6 Reflection

Part 1:

The most helpful assignment I did to prepare for my LR essay is the annotation of Bird Brain. This assignment gave me a good idea of what species to focus on. Walking around Mesa Court, the most common birds I see everyday are crows. The researches done in the documentary attracted my attention and I finally decided to focus on New Caledonian Crows. Watching and Discussing a TEDtalk is following next. It opens my mind of how animals really are. I used to think that animals may be smart, but they are definitely not as smart as a human. After watching the TEDtalk, I realized that some animals can do tasks that even human kids can't. The third assignment is Why Birds Matter. It helped me find the issue that birds are important, but their habitats are being destroyed by human. It gives me the idea of what conclusion I will draw from the researches about crows' intelligence.

Part 2:

I'm pretty confident about my essay. I think since I did a lot of researching, my BIG 3 are all closely related, and they all heavily focus on intelligence of New Caledonian Crows. I'm confident about the introduction and conclusion, also about the sentences connecting each of my sources and conclusions I drew from them. I'm not that confident about quotations. I think I should include more quotations in my essay to make it more credible.

Part 3:

I plan to focus on New Caledonian Crows and issues they face, which are habitat destruction due to human activities and climate change. I chose this because it is my subject of the LR essay and I want to start from things that I'm familiar about. I know that human activities are resulting in climate change which can permanently damage wild habitats of animals, and illegal hunting can result in a decrease of crow population. I know some organizations like WildAid and World Animal Protection US.