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

John Nielsen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2006

The California condor, with a wingspan of nine-and-a-half feet and a history as old as the Redwoods, should be extinct by now. It should not be soaring over the Grand Canyon, Big Sur, and south-central California. It should not be breeding like a machine in zoos. It should be a bitter memory. Fifteen years ago, there were only twenty-seven California condors left in the world, and they were all in zoos, where none had even tried to reproduce. The effort to save this bird had come to resemble a bar fight, in which environmentalists, scientists, and bureaucrats injured themselves and the species they were trying to save. It was embarrassing at best. Yet the condor has survived somehow. It has sailed past the brink of extinction, turned a broad circle in the sky, and returned to the wild again. The story of how this happened is more than the story of an endangered bird with an amazing wingspan. It is also the story of a wild and giant state that has become crowded and small, and the behind-the-scenes dramas that shaped the environmental movement.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

NPR's environment correspondent, Nielsen, writes, "The condor is a rat with ten-foot wings," adding a half-page later that no matter how you try to get rid of it, "one day it will stand, spread its giant wings, lean into the wind, and own you." The awesome, ancient creature has been teased back from the brink of extinction since the 1970s, as Nielsen describes, by a controversial captive breeding program that has nurtured the population from around 20 to over 200. Via an unfortunately stuttering time line, Nielsen focuses on the process and players in the $20-million California Condor Recovery program, describing the infighting in the scientific and environmental communities, at war about whether a "hands on" or a "hands off" approach will work best. Provocative questions environmentalists raise include whether the very nature of the bird is sacrificed by captivity. Nielsen gives these concerns some time, but is most entranced by the hazards and pleasures of working with these birds; he's at his best describing scientists in the field and the birds themselves. One is left with the fledgling hope that the process of trial and error will indeed work out for the condors. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The California condor was down to 27 individuals in 1987, when the last free--flying bird was captured. Fast-forward to today, when the condor's numbers are well over 200, and they not only have been rereleased into three separate locations in the wild but have also begun to breed. Environmental reporter Nielsen has written the history of the condor wars, which pitted environmentalists against environmentalists, while scientists and zoos stood in the middle. Whether to bring the last of the wild condors into captivity, where it was hoped they would breed in a safe environment, or whether to leave them in their wild habitat with no interference was a clash of major proportions, fought on philosophic, political, and practical battlefields. When the wild population was reduced to one established breeding pair, the battle tipped in favor of captive propagation, and all the birds were captured. This is also the story of the relationship between condor and human. The author's writing in the first person makes for engrossing reading. This is popular science writing at its peak. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (February 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060088621
• ISBN-13: 978-0060088620
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,188,445 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Return of the Condor, February 27, 2006

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Condor: To the Brink and Back--The Life and Times of One Giant Bird (Hardcover)

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 into the wild. No one really can predict how this will go. Chicks raised this way are often fed by hand, or at least by hand puppet, a covering for a hand that looks very much like an adult condor head coming down with food in its beak. This was supposed to let chicks sense that they were in a condor family, but one keeper said, "It only took the chicks a few days to figure out that there were people behind the puppets." Wild birds do not need to be thinking of people as a source for nutrition (or for any other blessings, given how we have treated them). There was a program of "aversive therapy" to keep them from being too affectionate to or curious about humans, and another to teach them not to land on power lines. There are important philosophical issues here; are such birds raised so unnaturally really natural members of the environment, and what is it that we have gotten for the millions that have been spent to get them back in the air? If you only count numbers, there are about a hundred condors flying free now, which is a real success, although some biologists think this only shows how badly we have failed to keep the environment a place where condors could continue to make their homes independently. Perhaps it is only appropriate that this strange bird, hideously ugly in appearance and fabulously beautiful in the skies, should bring out the best and the worst in us, and that its unresolved story should be filled with ambivalent messages.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Near Death Experience, July 7, 2007

By 

Philip Carl "EcoAngler" (Half Moon Bay, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Condor: To the Brink and Back--the Life and Times of One Giant Bird (Paperback)

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Issues abound in the struggle to save these magnificent creatures from extinction., February 25, 2006

By 

Paul Tognetti "The real world is so much more... (Cranston, RI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Condor: To the Brink and Back--The Life and Times of One Giant Bird (Hardcover)

A bit more than two decades ago the actual number of California condors had dwindled to roughly two dozen birds. If the species was to avoid extinction drastic measures were called for. There were many schools of thought as to how to deal with this impending environmental tragedy. Some even opined that the it would be best to just let the condor simply fade into history. "Condor: To The Brink And Back--The Life and Times of One Giant Bird" chronicles the struggles of those groups and individuals who were determined to save these ancient birds from almost certain extinction. Author John Nielson offers up a fairly comprehesive history of the species and explains the circumstances that nearly wiped the California condor from the face of the earth.

As Nielson explains, the California condor is a relic from the Pleistocene era. In those prehistoric times giant North American mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and oversize bison roamed vast areas of what would eventually become the American West. And so there was no shortage of carcasses available to scavengers like ravens, vultures and much larger birds like the California condor. When these giant creatures succumbed to a cataclysmic enviromental event some 10000 years ago one might expect that the California condor would be doomed as well. This is a logical assumption but what I was quite surprised to learn in "Condor" is that what actually saved these birds along the California coast were whales. Now condors would feed on the carcasses of dead whales that washed up on shore, Add the huge numbers of sea lions and seals to the available food supply and the California condor would be just fine after all. That is until events like the Gold Rush of 1849 would change the landscape of this previously wild territory forever.

Fast forward to the 1980's. So much had happened over the previous 130 years and just about all of it to the detriment of the California condor. If drastic action is not taken right away then condors will be extinct within 20 years. There are only 24 birds left. Most environmentalists favor a plan to capture all the remaining birds to breed in captivity. However, a minority of environmentalists considered this concept to be absolutely outrageous and bitterly opposed the plan. In "Condor", John Nielson introduces us to leading figures on both sides of this controversial question. He chronicles what steps were eventually taken and opines how things have turned out thus far. He also speculates on the uncertain future these colossal creatures face in the 21st century. For the most part I found "Condor" to be absolutely captivating.

The struggle to save this ancient species is just one small facet of the ongoing debate over environmental policy in this country. We all need to read more about such issues so that we might make more informed decisions at the ballot box. John Nielson has given us a book that is at once very readable, highly informative and quite entertaining to boot. Recommended.