Condor by John Nielsen

Author:John Nielsen [John Nielsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061740640
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

[Our bird] managed to escape at one point, and raced full tilt to the end of the leash and surprise: the water-softened soil no longer held the stake and the young bird was off and soaring over the chaparral. It immediately went below the line of sight and [a colleague] lost it, a frantic search turned up no bird. When last seen the wooden stake was still trailing from the leash.

Sibley knew the condor was young because its head and under-wing feathers were still black, but past that he knew nothing. He didn’t know where the condor lived or who its parents were. He didn’t know how old it was, or why it looked like such a zombie or whether anyone would ever see it again.

More frantic searching followed. More biologists joined the chase. For several days they again scoured the rugged countryside, looking for a bird that hardly anyone expected to find alive. Sibley finally found it when he smelled something awful emanating from under a big bush. Crawling underneath the bush he saw Topa Topa hanging upside down like a giant roast chicken in the window of a deli, its leg still fastened to the tether. The stake at the other end of the tether was caught in the branches of the bushes. Sibley climbed up and pulled it out, recalling that the condor “thanked me for finding him by taking a very painful chunk of flesh out of my arm.”

Topa Topa lay on its side in a cage in the front seat of Sibley’s pickup truck as he drove it down to the zoo. The tethered leg was clearly injured, but Sibley didn’t know how badly. When he reached the zoo, he gingerly set the bird down in front of a bowl of food. Almost immediately, Sibley said, Topa Topa “stood up on its tiptoes and stretched like it was ten feet tall, walked across the floor, and gobbled up the food. The collective sigh of relief was amazing.”

Topa Topa hasn’t seen the wild since. He’s been at the Los Angeles Zoo for thirty-seven years now, and there have been few dull moments. Attempts to put Topa Topa in a cage with other vultures failed when he bit the wattles off their necks; he also bit the lips of a llama in an adjoining cage. Topa Topa often flew across his pen and slammed his feet into the chests of human visitors, knocking them through open doors or onto their backsides. And whenever keepers tried to examine him he tried to eat their clothes. “Shoelaces were ripped loose and shoes were torn apart,” wrote bird keeper Frank Todd in one of a series of reports he prepared for the zoo. “There was usually nothing left of the socks above the tops of the shoes, and on one occasion Sibley’s pants were ripped open from pocket to cuff.” When Topa Topa was moved to a cage with an artificial cliff, he proceeded to destroy it. When other animals were housed with him, he refused to let them eat.

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