The egg posed a problem. Biologist Shawn Farry and his crew had spent much of March and April collecting sick and dying California Condors from the red rock landscape of northern Arizona, including a bird officially known as 316. The 20-year-old female had succumbed to avian influenza shortly after laying her egg in a high cliffside cave. Her mate, 680, now tended the nest alone in a small space that likely harbored the deadly virus.
“There wasn’t really anything we could do to help him,” says Farry, manager of the California Condor program at The Peregrine Fund, the conservation group that manages the southwest condor flock—115 birds that roost and roam from the Grand Canyon to Zion National Park. On his own, 680’s chances of hatching the egg were vanishingly small and, unwilling to leave the nest very long to eat or drink, the 10-year-old male was himself in danger.
So, not knowing if the chick inside was dead or alive or whether it, too, was infected with avian flu, Farry and his team decided to take the one action they knew could give 680 a shot at survival: bring the egg into captivity. If humans could successfully hatch it, they could also bring one more condor into the world that had almost lost them forever.
North America’s largest land birds, the vultures with nine-foot wingspans once flew over much of the continent, but poisoning and habitat loss took a terrible
