In 1987 every California condor left alive on earth was caught and put in a cage. There were twenty-seven of them. Sy Montgomery went to the Santa Barbara Zoo and out into the field to find out what the people who put those birds back in the sky actually do all day, and this is that book, with full color photographs on nearly every page.
One thing worth saying plainly, because it changes how you use this shelf. Scientists in the Field is not stealth science. Nothing is hidden here. The scientists have names and job titles and the science is the whole subject. What a child gets from it that they will not get anywhere else is the shape of the job: the waiting, the funding, the paperwork, the specific tools, and the days when the answer is that the bird died anyway.
The science it actually teaches
Start with the poison, because that is the spine of the book. This one sits on our Stealth Science shelf for its toxicology, not for its wingspan.
A condor is an obligate scavenger. It does not hunt. It eats things that are already dead, which is a useful job and also the trap. When a hunter takes a deer with a lead bullet, that bullet does not stay in one piece. It fragments, sometimes into dozens of specks spread through the meat and through the gut pile left behind. A condor comes down, eats, and swallows metal. Lead is a nerve poison. A badly poisoned bird loses the muscle action that moves food through its crop, and it can starve to death with a full crop. Your child is going to remember that sentence.
The treatment is real medicine. Chelation is a drug that binds to lead in the blood so the body can pass it out, given by injection over a course of days, in a hospital, to a bird with a wingspan wider than a car is long. That is a veterinary intensive care unit run for a wild animal, and the photographs show it.
Then the management. Every wild condor wears a numbered wing tag and carries a transmitter. This population is not estimated, it is known bird by bird, by number, and the birds are trapped on a schedule so blood can be drawn and tested. Most nature writing for children never shows a child what routine field biology looks like. This one is mostly routine field biology.
Two more that stick. Microtrash: adult condors pick up small bright hard objects, bottle caps and glass and wire, and carry them back to the nest, and a chick cannot pass them. Chicks have died with a stomach full of human litter, and the way anybody found that out was by cutting open dead chicks and looking. Double clutching: a condor lays one egg, and not every year, which is close to the slowest a large animal can reproduce. Take that first egg away to raise it, and the pair will usually lay another. That is the trick that made the arithmetic work.
And then the honest ending, which is the reason I like this book. The number is bigger. The population is not self-sustaining. Stop the trapping and the blood draws and the treatment, and it falls again. A child who finishes this comes away understanding that saved is a verb somebody is still doing, not a box that got ticked in 1992.
The child it lands with
The one who already has opinions about endangered animals and is tired of being handed posters instead of reasons.
Half of this book is protocol: traps, tags, blood tubes, transmitters, holding pens. So it is also for the child who likes equipment and procedure more than they like cute. If yours would rather read a manual than a story about a brave animal, this was written for them.
And a child in a hunting family. I mean that as a recommendation, not a warning.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the lead chapter and put the awkward question on the table, because the book is going to put it there whether you do or not.
The argument in these pages is that lead ammunition is the single biggest killer of wild condors and that it should be banned. If anyone in your house hunts, that is a sentence about your household. So work it properly. Is the evidence on fragmentation actually strong, or is it assumed? Is copper ammunition a fair swap on accuracy and on price? What does a box cost, who pays for the change, and does the person paying get a say? A child who can lay all of that out fairly, including the parts that cut against their own family, has learned something bigger than condors. A child handed only the conclusion has learned nothing at all.
What to know going in
There is a lot of death here and it is photographed. Poisoned birds, dead chicks, a necropsy table. Montgomery does not sensationalize any of it and she does not soften it either, and a tender nine-year-old reading ahead of grade level may find the dead chick with the bottle caps inside it harder than you expect.
The book also takes a political position and does not pretend otherwise. It is against lead ammunition and it is arguing for legislation. In our part of the world that is not an abstract topic, and your child will meet an argument pointed at your own kitchen table. I would still hand it over. I would just rather you knew before page sixty than after.
The vocabulary is genuine science vocabulary, chelation and necropsy and obligate scavenger among it. The 5 to 8 band is fair for reading level. This is a book to have going on near you rather than across the house.
Where to get it
Condor Comeback is $11.99 here. Buy it as a poison book rather than as a bird book, because that is what it is, and it is the only title on the Stealth Science shelf where your family's own habits are part of the evidence being weighed. If nobody in your house hunts or shoots and nobody has ever wondered where a bullet ends up, a fair amount of what makes this one land will go past, and there are cheaper places to start.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
The Mighty Mars Rovers: Ninety Days That Lasted Years
The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity by Elizabeth Rusch
Grade 5 to 8
The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: What the Job Costs
The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea by Sy Montgomery
Grade 5 to 8
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
