雅思阅读精选：加州小狐狸的"绝处逢生"_雅思英语阅读

雅思阅读精选：加州小狐狸的"绝处逢生"

　　All his claws look nice and pretty ... but he has a broken canine, said Boser, a scientist with the Nature Conservancy and the restoration manager on Santa Cruz Island, the largest in the chain of eight Channel Islands off the coast of California.

　　After a brief exam, Boser released the yearling fox, which scampered off and vanished into some nearby shrubs.

　　It wasnt too long ago that such a routine checkup was a lot less commonplace. One of Americas rarest mammals, found only on six Channel Islands, theisland fox was driven nearly to extinction in the 1990s by predatory golden eagles. By 1999, there were only about 85 island foxes left on Santa Cruz Island, while nearby San Miguel and Santa Rosa Islands were each down to about 15.

　　Today, the species is on the verge of a dramatic recoveryone of the fastest in the history of the Endangered Species Actwith nearly 2,500 on the Channel Islands.

　　They were listed as endangered in 2004, and theyre pretty much ready to come off that list at this point, said Timothy Coonan, a biologist with the U.S. National Park Service , which works with the Nature Conservancy to preserve resources on Santa Cruz Island.

　　Threat From the Skies

　　Scientists think the island fox is descended from mainland gray foxes that arrived on the Channel Islands sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, and that the animals body shrank in size because of limited space and resources.