--- title: Conservation: how people help animals come back — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Conservation: how people help animals come back», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Conservation means protecting living things and their homes so that animals on the edge can come back, and it works: bald --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Conservation: how people help animals… # Conservation: how people help animals come back Lesson 78 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/0/) — Conservation means protecting living things and their homes so that animals on the edge can come back, and it works: bald eagles, humpback whales, red kites and Arabian oryx have all returned from the brink. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/1/) — The recipe is usually simple to say and hard to do: stop the killing, protect and join up the homes, remove new dangers like rats or poison, breed animals safely and set them free again. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/2/) — Cut a small hole at the bottom of a garden fence and you have just built part of a hedgehog highway; picking up fishing line on a beach clean is real conservation too. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/3/) — In cartoons one hero saves a species in an afternoon; in real life it takes scientists, rangers, zoo keepers and ordinary people working for decades, with every kakapo named and every condor counted. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/4/) — Bald eagles fell to about 400 to 500 nesting pairs in the lower 48 US states by the 1960s, partly because the pesticide DDT, building up from tiny water bugs into the fish and then into the eagles that ate them, made their eggshells too thin; after DDT was banned in 1972 they recovered to well over 300,000 birds. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/5/) — Commercial whaling killed huge numbers of whales until a worldwide pause began in 1986, and humpbacks have since recovered strongly in several oceans, though slowly, because whales live long and have few calves; male humpbacks sing long songs that spread across oceans. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/6/) — Protecting and joining up bamboo forests in China helped giant pandas, which moved from endangered to vulnerable in 2016 when wild numbers grew to about 1,800. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/7/) — Wolves were wiped out from Yellowstone by the 1920s, and 31 were brought back from Canada in 1995 and 1996; elk changed where they grazed, letting some riverside trees grow again, though scientists argue how big the effect was. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/8/) — A wild beaver family on the River Otter in Devon was allowed to stay in 2020; beaver dams slow rivers, hold water in droughts, reduce flooding downstream and make ponds full of wildlife, so beavers are called ecosystem engineers: they change the land around them more than almost any animal but us. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/9/) — Red kites were almost wiped out in England and Scotland by poisoning and shooting; so few were left that birds of the same kind from Spain and Sweden were released from 1989, and there are now thousands of pairs. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/10/) — The kakapo is a flightless, nocturnal New Zealand parrot, the heaviest in the world; it nests on the ground, where rats and stoats eat its eggs and chicks, and only 51 were known in 1995, but on predator-free islands with every bird named and checked, numbers have risen to around 250. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/11/) — By 1987 only 27 California condors were left, all caught for breeding because lead from bullets in carcasses poisoned them; there are now more than 500, over half flying free. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/12/) — Good zoos keep family records called studbooks so that rare animals are not too closely related, because a healthy mix of genes helps them survive disease and change. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/13/) — The Arabian oryx was hunted to extinction in the wild by 1972, but zoo-bred animals were released in Oman from 1982, and it moved from endangered to vulnerable in 2011; seen from the side its two long straight horns can look like one, and some think the unicorn legend came from it. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/14/) — Hedgehogs walk about 1 to 2 kilometres a night, and a hole about 13 centimetres square in a fence lets them pass between gardens along a hedgehog highway. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/78-conservation-animals-come-back/15/) — Beach cleans stop plastic washing back into the sea, and counting the rubbish helps scientists find where it comes from; lost fishing nets, called ghost gear, can keep catching animals for years. - ← previous: [Endangered animals and extinction](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/77-endangered-animals-and-extinction/) - next →: [Animals of Australia and New Zealand: kangaroos, koalas, wombats, kiwis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/79-animals-of-australia-and-new-zealand/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)