Songs of Disappearance is a 24-minute album of endangered birdcalls recorded by Australia’s best wildlife sound recordist, David Stewart. It sold over 2,000 copies and shows the love of Australians who want to help their native species — with all proceeds (收益) going to conservation of our feathered friends.

Its genesis came when Stephen Garnett, a conservation professor at Charles Darwin University, finished the2020 Action Plan for Australian Birds, a set of recommendations that found 1 in 6 native species are threatened with extinction. He had a conversation with his Ph.D. student Anthony Albrecht, a classical cellist (大提琴手) and one-half of a two-person multimedia company called the Bowerbird Collective.

Albrecht asked his advisor if there was anything Bowerbird Collective could do to make people aware of the action plan. That was when they discussed the idea of an album. “I knew it was an ambitious thing to suggest and — I don’t know — Stephen’s a little bit crazy like me, and he said, let's do this,” Albrecht tells NPR. The other half of Bowerbird, the violinist Simone Slattery, arranged a musical collage (拼贴) of all 53 birds on the record, while the remaining tracks are each bird’s individual songs recorded by Stewart.

“We did it! Thanks to your incredible support we reached Number 3 in the ARIA charts, ahead of Taylor Swift, ABBA, Mariah Carey and Michael Buble,” the organizers wrote on their website, noting the Christmas-time bump given to the latter.

All proceeds of the album were donated to BirdLife Australia, which helped in production.

Some of the singing comes from birds that are Critically-Endangered, and one bird, the Night Parrot, wasn’t even known to science until 2013. “The golden bowerbird sounds like a death ray from some cheesy 70s sci-fi series,” says Sean Dooley, the national public affairs manager at BirdLife Australia.

【小题1】What does the underlined word “genesis” in paragraph 2 probably mean?

A．Conversation.

B．Change.

C．Record.

D．Beginning

【小题2】Who is good at playing the violin?

A．David Stewart.

B．Anthony Albrecht.

C．Simone Slattery.

D．Sean Dooley.

【小题3】Why did the organizers mention Taylor Swift in paragraph 4?

A．To state the popularity of the album.

B．To compare different musical styles.

C．To stress the influence of the album.

D．To show Taylor Swift’s love for the album.

【小题4】What was the money from album sales used to do?

A．To record a new album.

B．To preserve endangered birds.

C．To donate to charity organizations.

D．To expand the multimedia company.