Return of the Condor

The Race to Save Our Largest Bird from Extinction

John Moir

• Publisher: Lyons Press
• eBook ISBN:
  9781461749073
• Year: 2006

“A heart-stopping saga of the rescue from the very brink of extinction of one of the grandest of all birds.”—Thomas Lovejoy, president of the Amazon Biodiversity Center.

RETURN OF THE CONDOR is the riveting account of one of the most dramatic attempts to save a species from extinction in the history of modern conservation.

With the condor’s population down to only twenty-two birds in the 1980s and their very survival in doubt, the condor recovery team flouted conventional wisdom and pursued a controversial strategy to pull the bird back from the brink of extinction. Thus began the ongoing, decades-long program to reestablish America’s largest bird in its ancient home in Western skies.

Award-winning science writer John Moir takes readers into the backcountry to get to know the recovery program scientists as well as some of the individual condors. These are stories of peril, uncertainty, and controversy. Woven throughout these tales of heartbreak and triumph is the extraordinary dedication of the humans who have sometimes risked their lives for this charismatic, intelligent, and social bird.

Despite the program’s remarkable successes, the condor’s narrative is still unfolding with a number of challenges remaining. This includes the dilemma of lead poisoning among free-flying condors that is a major obstacle to the bird’s recovery.

Finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize

from the Stanford University Libraries

Honorable Mention from the National Association of Science Writers

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Last Condor
• 2. Naked Vulture
• 3. Searching for Gymnogyps Californianus
• 4. Carl Koford’s Sensitive Bird
• 5. The Stormy Sixties and Seventies
• 6. Death of a Chick
• 7. Doin’ the Double-Clutch Two-Step
• 8. Point of No Return
• 9. Captive-Breeding Conundrums
• 10. A Senseless Death
• 11. AC8’s Day in Court
• 12. Shadows in the Sky
• 13. Homeward Bound
• Appendix 1 Where to View Condors
• Appendix 2 Condor Web Sites