Condor: To the Brink and Back--The Life and Times of One Giant Bird

I picked up the 2006 edition of this book and enjoyed it thoroughly from cover to cover. I was a little put off at the start by how "the bird gets into your head". It sounded a little banal, and gave me concern that the book would be full of heavy-handed cliches, but the book immediately took off and kept soaring to the end. A great, engrossing read. It appears to be very thoroughly researched to boot. Just a few typos, though, which I expect were fixed in the 2007 ed.

If cats have nine lives, then the California condor as a species must be their equal. These birds have stepped to the edge of the extinction cliff and ALMOST fallen to a crushing collapse. After reading their story, you have to wonder if the creator was playing a cruel joke on this ancient and giant bird. First, with the exception of the huge black body and their graceful soaring, they aren't what you would call "easy on the eyes." They have a number of disgusting habits, and to top it off, they settled on Southern California as home (i.e., this place is being consumed by development at an alarming rate). Condors to the Brink and Back - covers this bird's life history all the way to the release of zoo raised birds into the wilds of California and Arizona. With each chapter that John Nielsen writes in their life history I felt like, "Okay, this is it. These birds aren't going to survive this one." In the end, the species (read: humans) which puts them against the ropes, is ultimately the same species which comes to their rescue. Nielsen introduces all the key players in what at times resembles a less-than-unified effort to save the mighty condor. Nearing the end of the book, what becomes apparent is man's role as the crutch the fragile condor must lean against to survive. As more condors raised in captivity are released into the wild, their dependency on wildlife biologists and zoo care-takers can begin to crumble. Encouraging news about California condors breeding and fledging new birds in their natural habitat is happening with greater frequency and spreading over a wider range including Mexico. Their longer term survival looks brighter and brighter. But some of the threats that put these birds on the brink of collapse are still present today in the form of lead pellets and bullets in downed game which the condors ingest and the ever shrinking range land which they inhabit. For the time being, we have the California condor back to grace our skies, and play an important role as one of nature's big body snatchers.

How one large bird journeyed to the very edge of extinction and came back makes for an exciting story: especially when related by a NPR environmental correspondent as in CONDOR; TO THE BRINK AND BACK - THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ONE GIANT BIRD. Here is where passionate reporting blends best with science, producing a moving story of how a small group of committed people refused to allow the condor to become extinct, joining forces to gather the last remaining wild condors to a pair of zoos where they were encouraged to breed with other captives. John Nielsen is a native Californian as well as an environmental writer, so he's in the perfect position to provide a survey of both California environmental politics and processes and natural history in this compelling account. Diane C. Donovan, Editor California Bookwatch

John Nielsen has clearly done his homework when it comes to understanding the fascinating history of the California Condor. He not only takes us through the natural history of condors from the Pleistocene to the present, he also introduces us to the remarkable cast of characters who have worked diligently for almost a century to prevent this species from disappearing. Written in an easy, engaging style, "Condor" combines ecology, history, and gossip to create a vivid picture of the challenges involved in saving a species that was more at home in the age of the mammoths than in the age of McMansions.

American condors are not an easy bird to love, at least for many people. Their points of unattractiveness are many. The condor is a vulture, a creature that eats dead and rotting things by sticking its bald, red, ugly head into carcasses. When it needs to cool its feet, it urinates on them. Its sense of interior design for the caves in which it nests is to decorate the walls with feces and vomit. John Nielson, in _Condor: To the Brink and Back - The Life and Times of One Giant Bird_ (HarperCollins) admits to all this ugliness, but says the images vanish when the bird takes flight: "You may think there's no chance you could ever give a damn about this bird, but take my word for it: once you see the condor soaring, it owns you." The birds have inspired a great deal of fervent enthusiasm, which has of course pitted enthusiasts against such types as farmers and developers, but has also divided those who want to save the birds into warring factions when they disagree on the fundamentals of how to do so. The condor has survived, but even Nielsen admits it has long been a species with no ecological value. It has survived, barely so, despite its involvement with humans and now directly because of them. The birds are amazing in many ways. They are one of the largest of flying birds, with a ten foot wing span. The finger-like feathers at the end of those wings are almost two feet long. As big as condors are, they were small scavenger birds compared to some of the others 1.6 million years ago in the Pleistocene, when they would have fed on mammoths, sloths, and saber-toothed cats. As Nielsen says, we'd pay plenty to get mammoths and saber-tooths back; what's it worth to keep an animal with the same history? Condors started being afflicted by humans who wiped out different mammalian species in the mid-1700s, and then by hunters who left their prey full of lead, and then by strychnine used to poison varmints, and then by collectors of their feathered skins and their eggs. By 1982 there were only about two dozen left. A great deal of basic research had to be done on the birds to get real understanding of how they lived. It was not until the 1980s, for instance, that it was learned by chance that condors are among the birds that "double clutch," laying a second egg in a season if they lose the first one. This meant that one egg could go to the zoo without making the flock smaller. Crews of condor-fanciers wore themselves out tagging condors in the wild or collecting the eggs; they called themselves "The Zombie Patrol" because as they staggered to the condor nest caves they were "filthy, smelly, bleeding, starving, stiff, and utterly exhausted." Eggs brought back (in a special padded suitcase) were hatched in the zoos. A program of simply tagging and releasing birds in the wild did not work; eventually all the last birds wound up as captives. There has been enough success in captive breeding that condors raised in pens have been released