雅思阅读 024 · Migrating Birds Sing to Team Up with Other Species

改编自 Scientific American（Gayoung Lee, 2025）。题型：段落信息匹配 + T/F/NG + 填空。难度：中等偏上（Passage 2，约 800 词）。

---

🎧 课文朗读音频（约 1 分钟）

正文 Passage

A. Flying solo in the dark

Tiny songbirds such as grosbeaks and warblers migrate thousands of miles, flying at night and resting during the day, to and from their wintering grounds — and unlike many larger birds, they often forgo flocks and travel independently. But recent research suggests they are not entirely alone in the dark sky.

B. Listening to the night

Benjamin M. Van Doren, an ornithologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues set up ground-based microphones at 26 sites across eastern North America and collected more than 18,300 hours of calls from birds in flight. The researchers found that solitary migrating songbirds seem to cooperate across species, possibly sharing information with other solo travellers about who they are and what to watch out for ahead.

The findings, published in Current Biology, add to growing evidence that interspecies social interactions may influence songbirds' migratory behaviour far more than was previously believed. The conventional wisdom had been "that each bird is following its own internal instinct or its own experience," Van Doren says.

C. Why call in the dark?

Flying in the dark presents challenges to airborne cooperation; for example, visual cues such as other birds' flight paths are absent. "It's really been unclear why exactly they are spending all this energy and all this effort calling while they're migrating," Van Doren says. "There must be some reason or benefit to this behaviour. Otherwise they're just wasting energy."

To analyse the gigantic amount of data, Van Doren and his colleagues used machine-learning technology adapted from Merlin, a bird-call-identification app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

D. Evidence of socialising

The scientists found that individual birds from different species were flying near one another and calling out using certain patterns, "more so than we could explain by chance," Van Doren says. So there appeared to be some reason the birds were staying in proximity.

Rather than the birds finding their way completely solo, he says, "maybe there's actually some social information being exchanged among these billions of songbirds migrating at night, which would totally flip around our understanding of how songbird migration works."

E. What are they saying?

It is still unclear exactly what information the birds may be communicating. But researchers have some pretty good guesses. Different bird species had different calls, but even within the same species, their "pings" varied across age or sex groups — suggesting that birds might be using such calls to introduce themselves.

Whatever the case, it is highly likely that "staying in touch with other individuals could help them navigate more effectively," Van Doren explains. They could be exchanging knowledge about landing spots and tricky weather conditions such as fog or rain, for example. "Migration is a very risky time even for birds that have done it before."

Scientists have previously observed that songbirds form mixed-species flocks while searching for food and avoiding predators during the day. The new study suggests such partnerships could play a more significant role than researchers realised.

---

题目 Questions

Questions 1-5: Which paragraph mentions the following?

1. the use of machine-learning technology to analyse calls

2. birds flying alone but calling to each other

3. different calls varying by age or sex

4. 18,300 hours of recorded bird calls

5. mixed-species flocks during the day

Questions 6-9: T/F/NG

6. Songbirds always migrate in large flocks.

7. Van Doren's team used 26 microphone sites.

8. It is certain that birds are exchanging weather information.

9. Migration is risky even for experienced birds.

Questions 10-13: Complete the notes. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.

• The study was published in the journal (10) ____________.
• The researchers used an app called (11) ____________ to identify bird calls.
• Birds' calls varied by (12) ____________ or sex groups.
• They may be exchanging knowledge about landing spots and (13) ____________ conditions.

---

答案 Answers

题号	答案
1	C
2	A
3	E
4	B
5	E
6	FALSE（often travel independently）
7	TRUE
8	FALSE（unclear exactly what information）
9	TRUE
10	Current Biology
11	Merlin
12	age
13	weather

---

核心词汇

songbird / migration / flock / ornithologist / microphone / machine learning / call / species / interaction / proximity / navigate / landing spot / predator / weather