This Bird SURVIVED Because She NEVER QUIT
ON A SPRING DAY IN 2019, IN A SMALL CAVE TUCKED INTO A MASSIVE cliff in Zion National Park, a California Condor chick pecked its way free of its enormous egg. In the first days after the young bird emerged, its parents took turns cuddling their baby just as condors have done for tens of thousands of years. But this birth was anything but ordinary. That little bundle of fluff taking its first teetering steps on unsteady legs was the 1,000th chick born to the California Condor Recovery Program.
When the recovery program began, in the early 1980s, only 22 condors remained in the world. Back then the prospect of reaching this milestone was unimaginable, recalls biologist Jan Hamber. “At the time, so much was unknown about the species. And it was an open question whether the condor could be saved.” As a member of the team racing to save the bird from extinction, she trekked through rough, remote California wilderness to find and monitor the fast-disappearing scavengers, making observations and decisions that would prove critical to their recovery. At age 90, she is still devoted to preserving the iconic bird, now as manager of the Condor Archives, a unique repository of condor information housed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
In her sunlit office, Hamber settles in her chair and folds her hands over her chest. Her easy manner makes others immediately feel comfortable, and she still wears her field biologist attire: jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a condor logo. Aside from her hair softening to gray, she looks much the same as she did decades ago when she hiked endless miles in Santa Barbara’s rugged backcountry researching some of the last wild birds. Condor pictures crowd one wall, and a menagerie of toy condors sprawls across a cabinet top.
