Return of the Condor
The Race to Save Our Largest Bird from Extinction
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- 21,99 €
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- 21,99 €
Publisher Description
“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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moir deftly chronicles the efforts of the dedicated biologists at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service who work to save the California condor from extinction. Remarkable birds with 10-foot wing spans and the ability to fly 150 miles a day, the condors numbered only 27 in 1987, and, although members of the service's condor recovery program had for years been trying to help the population recover in the wild, all but one of the birds lived in captivity. After a bruising battle with those who opposed confining condors for any reason (including David Brower of Friends of the Earth), the biologists captured the remaining wild condor and put all their efforts into a captive breeding program. Moir, who has spent years writing about the recovery team's work, keeps the reader in suspense from the poignant moment when the last wild condor was captured to the triumphant morning in 1992 when the first birds raised in captivity were released. Today more than 125 California condors fly free. But as Moir convincingly shows, their environment is fraught with dangers. The book includes appendixes listing condor Web sites and places to view condors.
