66.
Electro-Robo can do all the following EXCEPT
.
A. sitting
down B. shaking
hands C. talking D. walking
E
Three
years ago, five parrots were set free in a wild place of Arizona,
thousands of miles from the Channel Islands in Jersey where they had been looked after by
zookeepers. No evolutionary strategies informed them how to behave in this new
Landscape of mountainous pine forest unoccupied by their kind for 50 years. To
the researchers’ surprise, they failed to make contact with a group of wild
parrots imported from Mexico
and set free at the same time. Within 24 hours the reintroducing ended in
failure, and the poor birds were back in cages, on their way to the safety of
the Arizona
reintroduction programme.
Ever
since then, the programme has enjoyed great success,
mainly because the birds now being set free are Mexican birds illegally caught
in the wild, confiscated(没收)on arrival north of the border, and raised by their parents in the
safety of the programme. The experience shows how
little we know about the behaviour and psychology(心理)of parrots, as Peter Bennett, a bird researcher, points out:“Reintroducing species of high intelligence like
parrots is a lot more difficult. People like parrots, always treating them as
nothing more than pets or valuable ‘collectables’. ”
Now
that many species of parrot are in immediate danger of dying out, biologists
are working together to study the natural history and the behaviour
of this family of birds. Last year was an important turning point:
conservationists founded the World Parrot Trust, based at Hayle
in Cornwall, to
support research into both wild and caged birds.
Research
on parrots is vital for two reasons. First, as the Arizona programme
showed, when reintroducing parrots to the wild, we need to be aware of what the
birds must know if they are to survive in their natural home. We also need to
learn more about the needs of parrots kept as pets, particularly as the Trust’s
campaign does not attempt to discourage the practice, but rather urges people
who buy parrots as pets to choose birds raised by humans.