152. California Condors

There are only 561 California Condors in the WORLD, making them one of the RAREST BIRDS. And this summer, Nora saw two of them. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora: I’ve joked before that this podcast could be called it’s going to be about birds and You know what? It is going to be about birds Yet again, but if you are a bird hater out there like my neighbor’s cat Grinch Keep listening and actually Grinch if you could focus your bird hating on just the grackles that keep crapping all over my car in the driveway That’s the kind of bird hating I could get behind, but otherwise, this podcast is for and about the birds.

This summer, my family and I took a little road trip at the end of the summer from our home in Phoenix up to Zion National Park in Utah. This is a lot of desert on this drive, and while some people think of the desert as bland or boring or even ugly, they are wrong. their opinion is incorrect. Desert is beautiful.

It can be so beautiful. It is diverse and ever changing and constant and resilient and if you think it’s all just the same, you’re not looking hard enough or maybe you just don’t know what you’re looking for. I definitely didn’t know what I was looking for when we pulled into the Glen Canyon. recreation area on our way to Zion. Not Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon. Had never heard of it, but I was just out there looking for a canyon, which is not hard to find. It’s a big gaping hole in the ground with, at this canyon at least, a pedestrian bridge across it. It was early afternoon when the sun is very hot, even when it’s not a heat wave, which there was.

A massive heat wave this summer, and we did what everyone else was doing. We walked to the edge of the bridge, peered down, and thought, Okay, okay, we saw it. But we didn’t see it. Not until a woman walked up to us and told us to look down and to the right. 

And there, on the struts beneath the bridge, were two of the weirdest looking birds I have ever seen in my life.

They looked kinda like… Uglier turkeys, which it’s hard to be uglier than a turkey, truly, with weird red heads. One was kind of fuzzy. They were just weird, big, weird, ugly birds. But of course they weren’t just weird, ugly birds. They were, as our amateur guide told us, California condors. In Utah, yeah, in Utah, birds can fly and they do.

They travel. 

So my kids and I watched. These ugly birds sitting there and my husband stood a few yards away because being on a bridge scares him and I respect that and I learned that the most amazing thing about this bird is not just that it is incredibly ugly, but that when I was my son’s age, these birds were extinct.

They were gone. In 1987, the 27 remaining condors were gathered up, bred, and sold. and then recently slowly released into the wild. So on a side quest we almost didn’t take, we saw one of the world’s rarest bird species. A bird I never could have seen in my childhood. A bird that almost didn’t exist anymore.

A weird, ugly bird. All because a lady who didn’t know me wanted to make sure I looked a little closer and saw it.