Scott Edwards stopped his cross-country bike trip when he found a red-headed woodpecker (啄木鸟). “I got my first good look today,” he says. He was phoning from his tent in Illinois later that night. “I hadn’t seen the red head until today, so I was very excited.”
Edwards is a bird researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Over this past summer, he rode across the United States. In some degree, he did it to see the country. But he also used the trip to do some serious bird-watching. That’s something he’s been doing for more than 40 years.
When he was growing up in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, there were lots of trees, he recalls (回想). When he was nine or ten, a neighbor took him bird-watching. Edwards has been doing it ever since. But finding those birds is getting more difficult. “The numbers of birds are dying down,” he says. And Edwards is hardly the only one to notice it. Scientists around the world have been finding the same thing.
A 2018 study by Bird Life International found that birds around the world are in trouble. There are about 11,000 species of birds. Four in every ten species of them are decreasing in number. That’s true for all kinds of birds living in all types of habitats (栖息地). Only a few members of these species remain in the wild. And even common birds are less common than they were just 50 years ago. What’s worse, that’s now true almost everywhere.
【小题1】Why did Scott Edwards feel excited?| A．He found a good way to set up his tent. | B．He took a bike trip alone successfully. |
| C．He became good-looking during travel. | D．He saw a special bird for the first time. |
| A．Doing bird-watching. | B．Studying at Harvard University. |
| C．Biking around the world. | D．Looking for red-headed woodpeckers. |
| A．Birds are decreasing in number. | B．Birds remain in the wild. |
| C．Birds are easy to find. | D．Species of birds are increasing. |
| A．Health. | B．Medicine. | C．Environment. | D．Travel. |
