Condor: To the Brink and Back--the Life and Times of One Giant Bird
By John Nielsen
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
The California condor
has been described as a bird
"with one wing in the grave."
Flying on wings nearly ten feet wide from tip to tip, these birds thrived on the carcasses of animals like woolly mammoths. Then, as humans began dramatically reshaping North America, the continent's largest flying land bird started disappearing. By the beginning of the twentieth century, extinction seemed inevitable.
But small groups of passionate individuals refused to allow the condor to fade away, even as they fought over how and why the bird was to be saved. Scientists, farmers, developers, bird lovers, and government bureaucrats argued bitterly and often, in the process injuring one another and the species they were trying to save. In the late 1980s, the federal government made a wrenching decision -- the last remaining wild condors would be caught and taken to a pair of zoos, where they would be encouraged to breed with other captive condors.
Livid critics called the plan a recipe for extinction. After the zoo-based populations soared, the condors were released in the mountains of south-central California, and then into the Grand Canyon, Big Sur, and Baja California. Today the giant birds are nowhere near extinct.
The giant bird with "one wing in the grave" appears to be recovering, even as the wildlands it needs keep disappearing. But the story of this bird is more than the story of a vulture with a giant wingspan -- it is also the story of a wild and giant state that has become crowded and small, and of the behind-the-scenes dramas that have shaped the environmental movement. As told by John Nielsen, an environmental journalist and a native Californian, this is a fascinating tale of survival.
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Reviews for Condor
12 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A book about giant flying scavengers that didn’t gross me out!If you’re squeamish, you may not be attracted to a book on a really large birds that eats dead animals carcasses. When the opening paragraph compares trapping these birds to waiting in a shallow grave, you may consider if you have the stomach for this material. But if you can read with an objective eye, you may be rewarded by this fascinating account of the project that prevented the extinction of the California condor. Written in a journalist style for lay readers, this book is not a natural history primer. Enough science is included for the lay reader to understand what the biologists and wildlife managers are doing but readers are not overwhelmed with technical details. Individuals (people and birds) are featured to personalize the story. I found particularly interesting how condors in re-established populations had been impacted by the human manipulation. Birds raised by people, even when people tried to raise them as much like condors as possible, did not act in the same ways the old “wild” condors did before we trapped them for captive breeding. It seems that while people managed to prevent their extinction, we caused condors to lose the cultural knowledge parents taught offspring about how to act like a “wild” condors. While we claim to have saved the species, we may not have saved all the qualities of the wild condors we hoped to perpetuate for the future. This raises interesting questions about animal behavior and learning, our relationship to wild species, and the true nature of “wildness.”