The condor in the kennel behind the front seat of the single-engine Cessna was alive and alert when the plane touched down at the small rural airport near the eastern edge of San Diego County. Don Sterner, a veterinarian at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, moved the kennel holding Igor to the front seat of his beat-up red Isuzu. Then he laid a blanket over the top of the kennel, hoping it would help keep Igor calm. During the windy drive to the park, Sterner kept raising the blanket slightly to peek into the kennel at Igor. By the time the Trooper reached the captive breeding compound behind the park, rumors of the taking of the last wild condor had begun to ricochet around the world. Reporters who’d been told that Igor was in San Diego were calling the zoo to ask for every last detail. Meanwhile, activists who’d threatened to “liberate” the bird were converging on the Los Angeles Zoo, having been led to believe that Igor was there.1
The guard waved Sterner through the big metal gates. After pulling up near the quarantine pen, he and a colleague slid the kennel out of the pickup, set it on the ground, and paused. If something was going to go wrong it would happen here, Sterner thought to himself. The door on this kennel was secured by eight metal latches that did not open easily, and when big birds rushed out too quickly, they’d been known to hurt themselves. A broken wing now would have the activists storming the gates of the compound. Condors also had a history of trying to make a break for it after scrambling out of kennels, doubling back into the faces of the keepers at the entrances to the pens. Lower on the list of concerns was the strong probability that Igor would try to bite off Sterner’s fingers when he reached down to open the latches.
Another vet diverted the condor by pushing one of his boots up against the side of the plastic kennel. Almost instantly Igor’s beak shot out between the metal bars, ripping into one of the leather-covered toes. Sterner got the latches open and started to pull on the door. Igor didn’t let him to finish the job.
“It was like POW! and he was out of there,” said Sterner. “He bounces into the quarantine pen, jumps up onto a perch, turns around to face us and freezes.” The air sacs near his neck were all puffed out, and the skin on Igor’s head and neck was bright, bright red. Every now and then the bird would jerk his head in the direction of a sound, only to end up looking at the plywood walls.
Igor couldn’t see the other condors, but I’ll bet he knew they were there. A guttural hiss from beyond the wall is all it would have taken, or maybe the stomping ruckus of a short mock charge. When the bird looked up he would have seen the sky on the other side of the thick black mesh stretched across the top of the pen. Clouds and tiny birds would have passed overhead, through his narrow field of vision. What an odd sight that must have been for him.
Igor was furious and terrified, and with good reason: in a matter of hours, his colossal range had shrunk to four hundred square feet. The pens that held the other breeding birds were bigger than that, but Igor was in quarantine, and the quarantine pen was twenty feet long by twenty feet wide. Giant wings and telescopic eyes were not going to do him any good in here.
On the other hand, Igor was alive, which is more than you could say for many of the condors he’d grown up with. “If we’d have left him out, he would have died,” said Sterner. “There’s no doubt about it. He would have eaten something full of lead pellets or pulled on a coyote trap and gotten blasted with cyanide, or been shot by somebody who didn’t want him around. Or maybe it would be something we don’t know about yet. We lost a lot of condors in the late eighties, and some of them just disappeared.”
Sterner left Igor alone until the condor looked hungry. The bird’s first meal was a processed loaf of horsemeat mixed with vitamins, bone, and odd bits of hair. Sterner then checked the bird’s health, measuring body temperature, heart rate, and breaths per minute, and then picked through the feathers for lice. He soon looked up into the bird’s nostrils and felt around inside the beak. Igor’s blood would be tested for a huge range of abnormalities and toxins. If everything checked out okay, he’d be moved to a flight pen in thirty days.
“Condors are resilient birds,” Sterner said. “They have to be, given what they eat. But they do get sick and listless, and we didn’t want to let that in. We didn’t need a virus running around in the captive flock, especially now. That could have been disastrous.”
When Igor arrived at the San Diego Wild Animal Park on April 19, 1987, there were twenty-seven California condors left on Earth. Thirteen birds were living at the captive center in Los Angeles; the others were in San Diego. “We didn’t have much of a population to work with,” Sterner said. “We didn’t know a lot about how the birds were related to each other. We were going to have to do some wild guessing when we put the first breeding pairs together. Basically, we’d be grabbing the females and putting them in with the males and hoping for the best.”
California condor eggs had been hatched at these zoos when Igor was carried in the door, but none of the captive birds had ever tried to breed. Sterner and his colleagues were fairly sure it would happen eventually, but there were a lot of ifs. If the birds were all first cousins, the species was probably doomed; if the so-called crucial “founder birds” refused to breed, the species was definitely doomed. Sterner didn’t know whether any of the birds were too old to breed or infertile. With only fourteen breeding pairs, he’d need a lot of luck.
At the Los Angeles Zoo, the situation was the same, except for the question of what to do with the condor known as Topa Topa. This was the bird Fred Sibley captured twice in the Sespe Sanctuary in the late 1960s, when it was refusing to eat and barely able to fly. At the Los Angeles Zoo, Topa Topa had been terrorizing keepers and other animals since the moment it arrived, and it now lived in isolation. “I don’t think he knew he was a condor,” said Mike Wallace, the man in charge of the L.A. breeding program. “He was always displaying to the keepers and they were encouraging it, because they thought it was special to be so close. If he wasn’t in the mood to display, they stayed the hell away from him, because he was extremely aggressive. You could send a keeper in there with a net and Topa Topa would take it away from him. He was one angry bird.” Wallace had made it a personal goal to see little Topa Topas brought into the world, but by 1987, all the other vulture experts thought he was wasting his time. The bird was old enough to feel the need to strut around in front of females, but when Wallace took his job in 1985, the females Topa Topa liked to strut for weren’t condors, and some weren’t even female.
In his years at the Los Angeles Zoo, Topa Topa had shared pen space with a lot of birds and animals, but never with another condor. When other California condors began arriving in the 1980s, Topa Topa was kept apart. “We didn’t know what he would do,” said Wallace. “And we couldn’t risk losing a potential breeding bird.” Wallace had a hunch that this was especially unfortunate from a genetic point of view, since Topa Topa had been taken out of the wild. He thought it possible that Topa Topa’s genes were very different from the genes of the other captive condors, and in the long run, those differences could prove crucial. Topa Topa might turn out to be the only bird immune to a dreaded disease, or a condor that lacked a dormant but potentially deadly gene.
Wallace was encouraged to collect some of Topa Topa’s sperm and try to use it to fertilize an egg inside another California condor. But vultures are notoriously unresponsive to that procedure, and Wallace didn’t feel like giving up yet. “I told [the recovery team] I wanted to put a young Andean female condor in with Topa, and when they agreed, I went ahead and did it before anybody could change their mind.”
As expected, Topa Topa flew right at the Andean, trying to intimidate it as he intimidated people. “He was going to fly right into her face and bite it,” Wallace said, but the Andean stood her ground and watched Topa Topa come at her for a moment, seemingly frozen in place, and when the attacker was too close to change his course, she turned aside, so that Topa Topa sailed past her into a plywood corner. Wallace said the female then turned around and “beat the crap” out of her aggressor. “What I realized was that, wow, he knows a lot about how to manipulate people who come into his pen, but he knows nothing about his own species.” Wallace left the birds together for a couple of days to see whether anything would change, but nothing did. Topa Topa kept attacking and the Andean kept ducking out of the way, and when she needed to, she’d whack him with her beak, feet, and wings. “When he cornered her, she just thrashed him,” Wallace said. “I don’t think he ever touched her. After four days I was worried he would begin to get nervous about being around his own kind, so we pulled her out of there.” Then he tried to make a different plan.
In 1987, the people who ran the nation’s zoos weren’t sure they wanted geneticists such as Oliver Ryder around. If they were, it was assumed that they would stay away from press conferences at which zoo directors bragged about the birth of the latest “pure” albino tiger cub, or the thirty-seventh chimp pumped out by the same set of adults. Those kinds of announcements may have thrilled the public, but they tended to infuriate Ryder, who tends to speak his mind.
“I’ll give you an example,” Ryder said when I met him in his office in the back of what had once been the morgue at the San Diego Zoo. “When AC-9 arrived at the Wild Animal Park in 1987, there was a big debate going on about the purpose of captive breeding programs. Zoo directors loved it when famous animals made babies, and that was all some of them wanted to know about. They didn’t want to spend the extra time and money it was going to take to develop genetically useful breeding programs. They just wanted to talk about how cute the little critters were.”
Ryder was one of the first to tell these zoo directors why they had to stop the nonsense. He was among the first “conservation geneticists” hired in the early 1980s, when the San Diego Zoological Society opened a research facility called the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, or CRES. When I first met Ryder in the late 1980s, CRES had already established itself as a world-class center for animal research. Projects under way in the former morgue ranged from the creation of an aluminum water bed for pregnant mammals, to the installation of hormone pumps in animals with breeding problems. Scientific papers reported on the pathology, virology, endocrinology, behavior, and genetic diversity of a wide range of very rare animals.
In the late eighties, molecular geneticists weren’t always media-friendly. But Ryder was, and is. Television crews were always dropping in at CRES to film the fog of liquid nitrogen that poured from the top of what Ryder called the “frozen zoo”—three metal tanks full of semen, egg, and tissue samples taken from endangered animals and stored in a supercharged freezer.
“Three hundred fifty species,” he said as we watched the fog. “Three hundred eighty-five degrees below zero. Fahrenheit.”
“What got you into this line of work?” I later asked, walking back to his office. Earlier that day, one of the other conservation geneticists at CRES had cracked a bitter-sounding joke about how rich he’d be if he’d taken his mother’s advice and studied the human genome.
“I was a stamp collector when I was a kid, and when the postal service put out a condor stamp, I thought it was very cool. After that my parents used to drive me up to Griffith Park to see the condor at the L.A. Zoo. The zoo wasn’t much to look at in those days—I don’t remember much besides the cages and the carousel—but there was this one cage that had a condor in it, and it was Topa Topa.”
Ryder interrupted himself to dig around inside a small refrigerator. Eventually he pulled out a tiny glass vial and handed it to me. “Look,” he said. “California condor DNA, in a gel. I’ve got the DNA of every living condor in the world in this refrigerator, and from many of the dead ones. When we look at that gel, we see patterns of bands that tell us all kinds of things.”
I gave the vial a studious look, lamely attempting to hide the fact that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Then I handed the vial back to Dr. Ryder, who returned it to the refrigerator. This was what the condor was in 1987—bits of DNA in vials lined up in a fridge that belonged in a college dorm room.
“The lines look a little like bar codes,” he explained. “When you compare them you find out how related the individuals are. It’s a complicated process that involves the use of mathematical algorithms that in my warmest moments I can only come close to understanding, but the basic idea behind the math is that you want to come in and count the band-sharing while giving extra attention to the anomalous bands. When you find a bunch of bar codes with the same irregularities, it’s likely that you’re looking at condors with a common ancestor, a shared line of descent.”
Over the course of the next few years, this kind of work would become routine, and not just at the zoos. Lawyers would be throwing around phrases like “shared anomalies” in bitter paternity disputes; eventually historians would join the fray. According to Ryder, it was the presence of an odd snip at the end of a long string of Y-chromosomes that proved that Thomas Jefferson made babies with one of his slaves. But that all lay ahead in the 1980s, when Ryder and a colleague set out to measure the genetic relatedness of the last of the California condors. Back then, nobody had ever done this kind of work before. As a result, fights over whether zoos should breed for numbers or genetic diversity didn’t make much difference in the end. Without a family tree to refer to, zookeepers could only guess at whether breeding pairs were totally unrelated, barely related, closely related, or ridiculously inbred.
Ryder and a colleague made those arguments matter when they found a way to draw the missing family trees. The condor project needed this breakthrough; when it was done, the future of the species seemed a little brighter than it had before. According to the bar codes, the last surviving condors hadn’t bred much with cousins, siblings, parents, or close relatives, and this raised the odds that the condor genome was in pretty good shape. It probably wasn’t full of recessive genes that worked like hidden time bombs set to blow up somewhere down the line, triggering killer diseases and severe deformities.
“The birds fell into three distinct genetic clans,” said Ryder. “This was a good thing. One of the clans held the condors we already knew were related, and this was also good. Topa Topa and AC-9 were in one of the other clans. They were from the same family, which was cool.”
“So, it’s possible to argue that this was a turning point in the history of conservation biology for biologists, right?”
“I’m fond of saying there’s a dividing line in the history of biology,” he said, ducking the question, “with the pregenomics era on one side and the postgenomics era on the other. In 1987, we were stepping across the line, into a world where everything was going to be seen through the lens of genome biology. And that’s exactly what happened. Everywhere you look, there are new tools, new technologies, new and wonderful opportunities. The problem is that when you look at the objects of your concern—species diversity, deeper gene pools, that kind of thing—all you see are trend lines pointing down toward extinction. We want to use the encouraging curve to affect the depressing one.”
The condor work proved it could be done.
Meanwhile, back at the sanctuary, Lloyd Kiff and Robert Mesta were revising the Condor Recovery plan and guarding the habitat. Twenty-two days after Igor’s capture, the Forest Service decided to review the status of 383,867 acres of lands withdrawn from leasing and mining operations to protect the California condor, raising the possibility that much of this land, including the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, would be reopened to mining companies, timber companies, home builders, road builders, motocross riders, and others. Kiff and Mesta were doing what they could to keep the lands withdrawn, but George Bush Senior’s White House was extremely sympathetic to the needs of the extractive industries, and the state of California didn’t seem interested in getting in the president’s way. In 1986, a spokesman for the Department of the Interior had wondered aloud about whether the condor program had become a biological “lost cause” and a financial “black hole.” The overall bill for the condor program had just reached $20 million, and a lot of people thought that was too much.
One of the loudest critics of the program was Bil Gilbert, a well-known nature writer who’d been following the effort to save the bird for many years. In an article he wrote in 1986 for Discover magazine, Gilbert announced that he’d had enough of the endlessly melodramatic fight to save not one but “two of the most insignificant of animals” from almost certain extinction. The animals in question, Gilbert wrote, were the black-footed ferret and the condor. “The condor has become a kind of Charles and Di story,” he added, “what with breathless bulletins about little buster’s hatching at the San Diego Zoo, that adjunct of the Johnny Carson show.”
The point of the article was in the headline itself: WHY DON’T WE PULL THE PLUG ON THE CONDOR AND FERRET? In the piece, Gilbert argued that “in the strictly zoological context” it was hard to justify spending a cent on “gaudy crisis patients” that had nothing to do with the natural world around them. Gilbert seemed to think that this was a fate far worse than mere extinction; “managed” species bred in captivity weren’t worth saving, he implied. “Even if all goes very well, we will, in fact, have produced these animals as we produce poodles, and we will manage them like domestic stock.”2
So why not spend the next $20 million on ecologically important mountaintops, or prize wetlands full of rare animals and plants? Why waste all that money on losers like the ferret and the condor? Gilbert planned to write something mournful when the ferret and the vulture were gone, even though that “might not be such a terrible thing as is commonly, reflexively thought”:
As has been noted, the functional importance of the condor and the ferret is now symbolic, ecological. The passing of two such celebrated species would dramatically call attention to the process of extermination, and the ways our activities now influence the process. Also if the condor and the ferret were to go we might be more greatly motivated on behalf of other species that are headed in that direction.
As the leader of a team of scientists created to advise the condor field crews, Lloyd Kiff was always sending letters to the editors of magazines that printed stories about the condor. After reading Bil Gilbert’s “Pull the Plug” article, he felt like firing off a long one, in which he would have pointed out the following:
But Kiff was way too busy to write letters like those, at least until he finished revising the official condor recovery plan. A plan can’t be accepted as official until everyone involved in the process signs off on it, and then waits for everyone else to sign before reading the plan again. If the person busy rereading the plan finds important language that wasn’t in the plan the first time around, he or she can take the offensive language out and start the process over.
Kiff had signed off on the recovery plan after taking out a paragraph that would have made it easier for the owners of a former land grant on the far side of the mountains to build suburban homes in an important corner of the condor’s feeding range. After Igor’s capture, lawyers representing the Tejon Ranch began to argue that the condor had become “technically extinct” when the last bird left the wild; the lawyers also argued that because the Endangered Species Act did not protect the habitats of extinct species, then it couldn’t be used to protect the habitats of “technically extinct” creatures.3
These claims had never been tested in court, but Kiff had a feeling they were related to an onerous paragraph he kept removing from the new version of the condor recovery plan, only to see that it had been restored when he read the plan for what was supposed to be the final time.
The paragraph would have exempted the owners of the sprawling Tejon Ranch from all land-use rules designed to protect the condor and its range. “Every time I found it I’d cross it out and send it back” to the Ventura office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he said. “They would send it off to Washington for a final review, and when it returned, the paragraph would be back in it. I don’t how many times I killed it before Washington finally gave up,” Kiff said. “It was like trying to stomp on a cockroach.”
In 1989, these gathering land-use fights were postponed by a controversial experiment. Over the objections of a number of ornithologists and activists, female Andean condors raised in zoos were released in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Lloyd Kiff called it a “practice run” designed to help the field crews prepare themselves for the day when the Andeans would be replaced by zoo-bred California condors. The critics called it “foolish and counterproductive,” warning that it might end up delaying the return of the California birds, and adding that Andean condors, unlike their distant cousins, occasionally ate from the carcasses of animals they’d killed themselves. Rumors that the Andeans would never be removed began to circulate, along with talk that the California birds would be moved to the Grand Canyon.4
Seven Andean nestlings were released in 1989; six more followed in 1990. Five were captured and then rereleased after badly fastened radio transmitters tore up the edges of their wings; one was removed because it never quite learned to fly; and one was electrocuted when it crashed into a power line.
Then, with one exception, the other birds began to see the wind, staying out of trouble while gradually expanding their range. The last of the Andeans to fail had a thing for hang gliders. More than once, shocked pilots turned their heads to see a vulture with a ten-foot wingspan pull up next to them, touch the wing of the glider with the tip of a primary feather, and fly at the same exact speed for a couple of minutes, all the while staring into the eyes of the human with the nylon wings. By the time the experiment was over, the remaining Andeans were flying through the mountains in eastern Santa Barbara County on a fairly regular basis, and one traveled ninety miles east to Riverside County. The field biologists were pleased to see the Andeans eat almost exclusively from “clean” carcasses laid out for them; they weren’t so pleased when big black bears stole the carcasses in the night.
I saw the Andeans in the Sespe in 1990. Dave Clendenen, then the federal government’s senior condor biologist in the sanctuary, led me to a plywood observation blind near the place called Koford’s O.P. I was looking out across a dry wash when I started hearing beeping noises coming out of the tracking gear. Clendenen tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up at the opening in the top of the blind, where two Andeans floated a hundred feet above our heads.
“You’ve been busted,” said Clendenen, stating the obvious. Shortly afterward, the condors swirled up and over to the south, toward the smog.
Early April, 1988: Don Sterner and the other keepers sat in the captive breeding center, staring at the closed-circuit monitor connected to the camera in UN-1’s pen. The condor was sitting in the corner of the pen doing nothing of significance, but all eyes remained on the screen. UN-1 was the first of the female Californians to copulate that year, and lately she’d been moving lugubriously around the pen. If this bird was pregnant, this was probably her due date, since it was about five months since she had mated with a condor known as AC-4. For that reason, every time it looked as if UN-1 was about to move, all the keepers watching the monitors leaned forward and held their breath.5
“We’re all wondering whether she’s sitting on an egg,” Sterner said, “but none of us can see one. We’re waiting and waiting in front of these monitors and no one is saying a word, and the atmosphere in there was so incredibly tense I couldn’t believe it, and then she moved.”
UN-1 stood halfway up and sat back down again, readjusting her weight. Everybody saw the egg flash white beneath her. For a moment, the walls of the trailer shook with the cheering of the keepers; then AC-4 climbed up into the nest box. “I said, ‘Okay, everybody, let’s go get that egg,’ and we rushed over to the pen,” Sterner added. “We netted the birds and put the egg in a bucket of warm finch seed and delicately carried it back to the incubation chambers and then we took one of those green kitchen sponge pads and sanded off the stuff that was stuck to the outer part of the shell and looked for cracks.”
No cracks. Sterner held the ten-ounce condor egg over a bright light called a candler and stared at the yellow-orange glow. “Everything inside looked fine,” he said. Seconds later, he put the egg down on a padded shelf in the middle of a boxy wooden incubator—98 degrees, adjustable humidity, backup power supply—and called Art Risser, the zoo’s curator of birds. More jumping and cheering.
Sterner and the other keepers checked the egg every day after that, rocking it back and forth on its longitudinal axis to distribute the heat from the candle, tracing the growth of the air sac with a soft lead pencil that was never pointed straight at the shell, adjusting the humidity of the incubator to speed up or slow down the rate at which water in the egg was evaporating through the shell, and looking for the bump on the surface of the yolk that is the first sign of cell division. When Sterner saw the bump, he picked up his walkie-talkie and made a short announcement to the staff at the park: “ATTENTION ANIMAL SCIENCES UNITS, THE CONDOR EGG IS FERTILE.” People called him back to yell and scream.
This was the first fertile California condor egg ever laid in a captive setting. Brief accounts of the grand event appeared in papers around the world. Tape recordings of vulture grunts and hissing sounds were played nonstop in the incubation room for the next several weeks. On April 26, a tiny hole called a “pip mark” appeared in the side of the egg. More stories ran as the chick started hatching. Then the chick got stuck.
“We dressed up in our surgical gear and went back in with nervous hands,” Sterner said, “knowing that the world would be out there waiting while we broke this little guy out.”
This is called “assisted hatching,” and it doesn’t always work. Sterner and biologist Cindy Kuehler took turns chipping at tiny fragments of eggshell, trying hard to stay away from parts of the membrane that could rupture and kill the chick. When they were sure the membrane was safe, they broke off slightly bigger bits of egg with their gloved fingers and a set of tweezers. “Steady gentle pressure is the key,” said Sterner. “Condor shells are kind of thick.”
Sixty-one hours after the pip appeared, at 5:38 P.M. on April 29, 1988, Sterner poured a 6.5-ounce condor chick named Molloko out of a meticulously disassembled egg into Kuehler’s hands. “The little legs were really kicking hard,” he said. “When we were done we took a group photo and went to a big press conference. Then we drank a lot of wine.”
Molloko was the only condor chick produced that year, but it was all the zoos needed. Critics fell silent and reporters fawned. Four California condor chicks hatched in 1989; eight more arrived in 1990. Keepers took the eggs from the parent birds as soon as they were laid and raised the chicks with puppets meant to imitate adult condors and fool the offspring. Many of the breeding pairs double-clutched, producing second eggs, which were also taken away. Some of the breeding pairs replaced the replacement.
By the end of 1990, there were forty condors living at the zoos, thirteen more than there were in 1987. By the summer of 1991, the count was up to fifty-two. By the standards of a species that was used to producing one egg every other year, this was miraculously rapid growth. The Andean condors that had been released in the Sespe had all been trapped and flown to South America, where they were released for the last time. The glitches in this process got no attention, which may have been a big mistake. Misbehaving Andeans were dismissed as freakish; a deadly collision with a power line was considered not likely to happen again, when in fact it should have been. Finally, at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, keeper Bill Toone said the condor puppets used to feed and preen the chicks weren’t fooling anybody. “It only took the chicks a few days to figure out that there were people behind the puppets,” he said. “One minute they’re oblivious, and then they’re looking at you through the one-way mirror.”
But Mike Wallace at the Los Angeles Zoo didn’t share Toone’s fears, and by 1990, he’d become the man in charge of the reintroduction program. Wallace felt an urgent need to put the birds back where they’d come from, and he hadn’t noticed any serious problems at his end of the breeding program. At the Los Angeles Zoo, even Topa Topa was trying to get into the act. Wallace said he saw his former problem bird start struggling with his sexuality in the summer of 1989, when it did a mating dance for the bushes in its flight pen (later it attempted to mount those same bushes). Topa Topa also tried to incubate a stray piece of PVC pipe that year. Wallace considered these unusual events an improvement over Topa Topa’s previous attempts to mate with the keepers, so he put a new female condor in the flight pen. Topa Topa preferred the bushes at first, but gradually he came around. In 1990, he attempted to breed with the other condor in his pen. When the egg turned out to be infertile, Wallace switched it with the egg of an Andean condor. When that egg hatched, Topa Topa was acting like a regular old proud papa, feeding the chick in twenty minutes.
“We let him rear the chick for about four months before we took it away,” Wallace said. “And he was a model dad. He would lie there and the thing would crawl on him, and he was gentle, great. That winter he mounted a female condor named Malibu and did everything he was supposed to do perfectly. The egg was viable, the chick hatched, and the parents have been happy and fertile ever since.”
On January 27, 1992, two California condors were released in the mountains of south-central California. Each had hatched from an egg produced by Igor and the condor known as the Matriarch, or AC-8. When the birds emerged from a man-made nest on a rocky promontory in the Los Padres National Forest, naturalists standing on distant cliffs applauded and drank champagne. The birds started jumping up and down and flapping their giant wings. It looked like they were dancing.
Pictures of the zoo-bred California condors leaving the release pen appeared all over the country. The next day, virtually all the coverage was positive. The zoos felt a sense of vindication.
Lloyd Kiff, the leader of the Condor Advisory Team, reacted differently. He’d signed the documents that ordered Pete Bloom to capture the last of the wild condors back in 1987, and at some level, he’d been worrying ever since. The worries weren’t particular, but they’d nagged at him for years. “I didn’t want to be remembered for signing those papers,” he explained. “When I saw the birds take flight I thought, ‘Okay, I’m off the hook.’ I was thrilled—we all were—but what I felt most was relief.”
More than a hundred California condors have been released to the wild since that day in 1992. But it turns out the first two California birds released didn’t last very long. One was captured and returned to a zoo when it started acting tame. The other died after slurping up a puddleful of bright green antifreeze.