Sy Montgomery - Condor Comeback

Text copyright 2020 by Sy Montgomery

Photographs copyright 2020 by Tianne Strombeck

All photographs copyright Tianne Strombeck except the following: Akinshin/Getty Images (feather photo): .

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Map artwork by Holly A. Sullivan

Cover design by Cara Llewellyn

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019020308

ISBN: 978-0-544-81653-4

eISBN 978-0-358-33066-0
v1.0720

IN MEMORY OF SARA SEWARD

Condor 174. The red color on the tag stands for 100 so the other numbers can be larger and easier for biologists to see from a distance.

S HE NEEDS TO DO NOTHING MORE than stand still to attract a crowd.

Perched on her favorite rock outcropping in the spacious exhibit at the Santa Barbara Zoo, her wings clad in shiny black feathers that rustle like taffeta, California Condor 174 is a giant among birds. She towers at four feet (1.29 meters) talltaller than the average seven-year-old girland weighs nearly thirty pounds (almost fourteen kilograms, or as much as a hundred baseballs). Her species is the largest species of bird in all of North America. Even her feathers are giants: some of them grow two feet (sixty-one centimeters) long. No wonder a group of peopleincluding youngsters smaller than shehas gathered to watch her.

She turns her orange neck and head to face the onlookers. Her red, knowing eyes briefly meet ours. It feels like a meeting of minds. With her stooped posture and bald, wrinkled, jowly head, she looks like a wizened sorceress, a sage, a powerful, wise old woman. When she raises her wings, holding them slightly open, she looks like shes about to give a blessingor cast a spell.

Then, the magic really happens: she hops twice, flaps thrice, and spreads her wings nearly ten feet (over three meters) wide to sail across her enormous pen.

Wow! Look how big those wings are! says a little girl wearing a pink sweatshirt and American flag sneakers.

Spread your wings! a bearded dad urges his youngest daughter. Immediately, the little girl and her three siblings rush to compare their arm span to a life-size sign opposite the pen, showing a condors yawning wingspan.

Thanks to these astonishing wings, a California condor can not only fly at a speed of 55 miles (88 kilometers) an hour but also soar to 15,000 feet (4,572 meters). Even more impressive, a condor can glide for miles without flapping, riding on rising currents of hot air called thermals and steering with just its tail and the tips of its long flight feathers. Condors dont just traverse heaven; they dwell there.

Its easy to see why these birds have thrilled and fascinated people for thousands of years. Once California condors were found in western skies from Canada to Mexico, and some lived as far east as Florida. Native people revered them. To many tribes, the condor was sacred. This was with good reason: Flying so high, the condor sees all. And these birds may live for sixty or more yearslong enough to grow wise.

But the California condor was not sacred to Western settlers. Far from it. The newcomers shot the birds for sport. Ranchers accused themfalselyof killing livestock. By the time conservationists realized condors were disappearing, their slide into extinction seemed unavoidable.

Arent they endangered? a ponytailed woman watching 174 wonders.

They are critically endangered! answers Dr. Estelle Sandhaus. In fact, Estelle tells the visitor, in 1982 there were fewer than two dozen of them left alive on the planetand when the last one was captured in Southern California in April 1987, the California condor was officially extinct in the wild.

A firecracker of a woman, standing five feet one inch tall, with shining brown hair, dancing brown eyes, and a laugh as exuberant as a waterfall, 41-year-old Estelle is the Santa Barbara Zoos director of conservation science. A big part of her job is to help make sure California condors forever grace North American skies.

And thats Condor 174s job, too. Born March 4, 1998 at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, 174 came to Santa Barbara on October 15, 2012, where she is now serving as a mentor to younger birds. Shes the most dominant bird, Estelle explains. Shes got sass. Shes got attitude. She knows shes the boss.

At the moment, 174s mentee is young Condor 603. Shes the youngest of the four California condors at the zoo (two others are not on display). Condor 603 was born in the wild but suffered a wing injury and was brought to the zoo. She can fly, but not well. At age three, shes still a child by condor standards. Shes got much to learnincluding condor manners.

Condors are social creatures, like people. They like to do things in groups. When some of the captive birds were first moved to an exhibit at the Santa Barbara Zoo, a keeper noted that the whole group, together, carefully plucked every California poppy that was in bloom in the exhibit, and put them all in a pile in the corner. Then the flock moved the pile. The first time one of the zoos condors landed on the weighing scale, all the other condors then jumped on it. Because togetherness is important, 603s education includes learning how a young condor should behave around her elders at mealtime.

Condor 174 sails across her enclosure at Santa Barbara Zoo.

Theyre going to get rabbits today, announces zoo bird keeper Ellie Culip. The condors eat four times a week. (In the wild, they sometimes eat so much they cant fly for several hours, and they might not eat at all for several days afterward.) On todays menu are white rabbits that were obtained from a breeder, humanely killed, then frozen, and thawed.

Ellie walks inside a concrete tunnel built into the artificial rock outcropping in the exhibit. She dons plastic gloves and reaches into a white plastic bucket for the first of the two rabbits. There are two narrow tunnels built into the rock, each just a little longer than Ellies arm. Ellie will use one of these tunnels to push the food through to the condors on the other side.

Why not just hand the birds the carcass? We never let them see us with the food, says Ellie. If wild condors are fed by humans, theyll search out peopleand that can be dangerous for an entire flock, because they learn from watching each other. And though these condors arent slated for releaseboth will probably stay at a zoo for breeding or to mentor other condorswe dont want to limit their possibilities for the future if management changes, Ellie says.