Word: condor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reason for all the interest is an ornithological first: the birth in captivity of a California condor, North America's largest land bird. The blessed event occurred not once but twice in the past two weeks at the San Diego Zoo. If the chicks live, they will explode the population of these imperiled creatures by some 10%. Only 19 still survive...
...births were a triumph for a controversial program that has had conservationists pecking furiously at each other. Over the protests of the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups that oppose any human intercession while the condors fight for survival, scientists from the National Audubon Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service entered the birds' habitat in California's Los Padres National Forest last February and March. They snatched two fertilized eggs from two roosts and transferred them to incubators at the zoo. The eggnaping, the scientists hoped, would protect the embryos against tumbles...
...strategy worked. One couple immediately resumed the age-old condor courting ritual in which the female nibbles provocatively on her mate's neck. Soon there was a new egg in the roost. At the zoo, Bird Curator Arthur Risser and his crew eagerly monitored the incubation. Two weeks ago, one egg showed signs of movement. Subsequently, a chick managed to peck a peanut-size hole in the shell. Like mother condors in the wild, the zoo staffers tapped on the eggshell. When the chick's strength seemed almost sapped from its struggle to free itself, Keeper Cyndi Kuehler...
White's technology often seems creaky, partly because he was a pioneer. Modern sci-fi doomsdayers would never predict the end of the world from an excess of radio waves, or have radial-engine Curtiss Condor transports symbolize the overreach of the air age. Even so, White was always among the first to discern the now familiar signs and portents: ecological disturbances, the decline of various species, the discovery that last year's medical boons may lead to tomorrow's degenerative diseases, the horrors of a mindless but ubiquitous visual press, and the debilitating result of trying...
TIME'S story on the endangered condor [Sept. 21] attributed to me the comment that "captive breeding has already saved the elephant seal." Several animals have been saved by captive breeding, but not the elephant seal. In response to TIME'S question about the ability of animals to recover from a small population base, I noted the history of the northern elephant seal, which has grown from a population of about 20 to one of about 40,000, but not in captivity. Siberian tigers, Mongolian wild horses, Père David's deer and European bison...