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  3. Last summer, the missing white-letter hairstreak butterfly was spotted in Scotland for the first time in 133 years. Conservation

Last summer, the missing white-letter hairstreak butterfly was spotted in Scotland for the first time in 133 years. Conservation

admin2022-07-26  62
问题     Last summer, the missing white-letter hairstreak butterfly was spotted in Scotland for the first time in 133 years. Conservationists wondered if the creature had established a breeding colony in the country—and a hew discovery suggests there is good reason to be optimistic. As Russell Jackson reports for the Scotsman, volunteer naturalists recently found a cluster of tiny white-letter hairstreak eggs on an elm tree in Lennel, a small village near the country of Berwickshire.
    Volunteers with the UK’s Butterfly Conservation have been carefully tracking white-letter hairstreak migrations for more than ten years. The butterfly, which boasts a distinctive "W" pattern on the underside of its wings, is native to the U.K. and was once widespread in England and Wales. But white-letter hairstreak numbers have declined drastically in recent decades,
    largely due to an outbreak of Dutch elm disease, an illness that took hold in the 1960s. The disease has killed millions of British elm trees, which is the food source for white-letter hairstreak caterpillars (蝴蝶或蛾的幼虫).
    Recently, there have been signs that the butterfly’s populations are recovering. The Butterfly Conservation team has observed the white-letter hairstreak gradually spreading northwards, possibly due to warming climates. But the white-letter hairstreak is still a very rare sight in Scotland, and the volunteers who found the cluster of eggs—Ken Haydock and Jill Mills—were thrilled by the discovery.
    "It was a lovely sunny morning and we were searching the elm trees by the River Tweed at Lennel when Jill called me over," Haydock says in a Butterfly Conservation statement. "I could see by the look on her face that she had found something. We were both smiling with disbelief and delight when we realized what Jill had found and within seconds I was fumbling in my pack for the camera—my hands were shaking!"
    That Haydock and Mills managed to spot the eggs is quite remarkable; according to Vittoria Traverso of Atlas Obscura, white-letter hairstreak eggs are smaller than a grain of salt. The volunteers were also excited to discover an old, hatched eggshell amid the cluster of new eggs. According to the Butterfly Conservation, this suggests that the white letter hairstreak could have been breeding in the area since at least 2016.
    Paul Kirkland, the director of the Butterfly Conservation’s Scotland chapter, says in the statement that conservationists will "need to have a few more years of confirmed sightings" before they can classify the white-letter hairstreak as a resident species of Scotland. "If this happens, it would take the total number of butterflies found in Scotland to 34," he says, "which really would be something to celebrate."
What do we know about the two volunteer naturalists?
选项 A、It was on a rainy day that they made the discovery.
B、Ken looked puzzled the moment Jill called him over.
C、Jill made the discovery first and took a photo of it.
D、They felt it unbelievable to make their discovery.
答案D
解析 根据题干中的信息词two volunteer naturalists和题文同序的原则，可以把答题线索定位到第四段。第四段第三句提到，当他们意识到吉尔发现了什么时，他们都难以置信，并开心地笑了起来，可知两位志愿者发现蝶卵时喜出望外，不敢相信这是真的，故本题应选D。由第四段中志愿者海多克的自述“那是一个阳光明媚的早晨”可知，选项A与原文表述不符，故排除，由海多克的自述“我从她脸上的表情可以看出她找到了什么东西”，可知海多克被叫住时他的反应并不是茫然的，故排除B；由海多克的自述“我就在背包里摸索着找相机——我的双手在发抖”可知，是海多克而不是吉尔为蝶卵拍的照，故排除C。
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