Wednesday, Sep 2

Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better.

All Dear Dot illustrations by Elissa Turnbull.

Dear Reader,

From the time he was a young boy, Bill Toone was obsessed with birds, earning his first job at 16 picking up trash at the San Diego Zoo just to be closer to the birds and animals, a Sierra Club story tells us. Toone climbed the Zoo ladder, from trash-picker-upper to tram driver to animal caretaker, until he eventually landed his dream job as the bird curator. 

A California condor sighting is enough to send any birdwatcher into a state of pure awe. As the story reports, these birds boast a wingspan of almost 10 feet, piercing red eyes, and bare heads — their feathers erupt into a boa of sorts at their necks. These threatened giants became protected under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 as human activity imperiled their habitat and food sources. By the 1980s, the condors’ numbers had dwindled to a mere 22 birds. 

When Bill Toone learned just how close the California Condor was to extinction, he took action. The story notes that California condors mate for life, and only lay one egg every two years … unless the egg is taken or doesn’t hatch, in which case the condor might lay another. Toone and his team saw this loophole, and took to eggnapping unborn chicks, and taking them back to their “condorminium.” The condors did exactly as Toone hoped, laying up to four eggs per pair to replace the stolen ones. There was still a problem, though. Upon hatching, condor chicks imprint on the first creature they see. Seeing as Toone and his team wanted to increase the number of condors that could be released back to the wild, they wanted the chicks to imprint on a condor … or something like a condor. Enter the condor puppet they commissioned from a nearby puppet theatre. It worked: as the chicks hatched, the puppet was the first thing they interacted with. 

“Thanks to Toone and others, the number of California condors continues to increase,” the story tells us. “Puppet designs have improved. Other zoos have gotten involved. Today, more than 350 condors fly free in California, Arizona, Utah, and Mexico.”

In 2022, Toone captured his story in a book entitled On the Wings of the Condor.

For him the success is clear and crucial: “We still have condors,” he told the reporter. 

Soaringly,

Dot

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