The largest bird in the United States, the California condor gracefully soars on the warm thermal updrafts over the chaparral valleys of California. It uses its primary feathers, located at the tips of its wings to position and stabilizes it when catching thermals. It’s an amazing flyer and can often reach speeds up to 55 mph. To see this gigantic bird in the air it’s incredible to think that it can even fly. The condor is an enormous bird with a wing span of nine and half feet and an average weight of twenty five to thirty pounds. Originally the California condor’s range was from Canada’s Vancouver all the way down the coast of California and into Baja Sur and Baja Norte, Mexico. By 1967, the last remaining natural retreat of the condor was in the Los Padres national forest in south central California (McMillan 1968). Mankind was the greatest threat to the California condor. Tainted natural resources caused by an ever increasing human population, land encroachment that caused a destruction of the birds’ natural habitat, and an ignorant killings by ranchers who mistakenly thought these carrion eaters as predators and threats to their livestock. All these factors led the California condor to the brink of extinction. However, in attempt to restore a species devastated by man’s own doings, and possibly to reckon for collective guilt of so many extinctions in the past, the California condor became one of the most successful comeback stories in species history. The California condor, a species indigenous to California, was first described from an adult specimen taken from Monterey California in 1792 by Scottish botanist and naturalist Archibald Menzies on his travels throughout North America. In 1797 George Shaw named the bird Vultur californianus in his book, Naturalist’s Miscellany. Subsequently, the bird was mentioned in other articles and books by different authors after Shaw, and was officially named Gymnogyps californianus in 1842 (Koford, 1953). The California condor is the family of New World Vultures, or Cathartidae. The Cathartidae family of vultures is comprised of six species: the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus), Andean condor (Vultur gryphus), King vulture (Sarcoramphus papa), Black vulture (Coragyps atratus), Turkey vulture (Cathartes aura), and the Yellow headed vulture (Cathartes urubu) (Koford, 1953; McMillian, 1968). The New World Vultures are not closely related to the Old World vultures but share similarities due to convergent evolution. Convergent evolution states that when two relatively unrelated species under similar selective pressures solve problems in a similar manner, the result is a species that looks alike but is not closely related (Jacobs, 2013). The condor is widely referred to as the California vulture by locals and simply called “buzzards” by the old time ranchers. The coloring of the California condor is quite different from other members of the condor family. The skin of its head is orange and transitions to grey in the neck, which gives way to gray-black ruffled neck feathers. On the front of the condor, just below the ruffled feathered neck is a distinctive patch of red-purplish skin. The skin on the throat area of the bird is a bright shade of red in contrast to its dull grey neck. With its wings spread open during sunning or during flight there are large triangular patches or bands of white underneath the wings. In juvenile birds, up to the age of four, there is a thick layer of down feathers that cover its head and neck, and as the bird matures this down covering gives way to pinkish looking skin (Osborn, 2007). The California condor is from the vulture family so it is primarily a carrion eater and scavenger. It feeds mainly on dead and rotting carcasses in all matters of decomposition. The favored dead animals are young calves, deer and goats. They have been known to eat fish on occasion. Their digestive system is well adapted to handle the rotting flesh they consume. Author Carl B. Koford wrote on condor feeding, “Condors will feed on carcasses which are in any state of decomposition. The squirrel carcasses upon which I saw condors feed were in various stages of decomposition. Many were bloated and foul, the hair was slipping, and the eyes were dried up, while others were fresh” (Koford, 1953). The condor’s beak is perfectly shaped for tearing and ripping flesh from the hides of dead animals. They are very clean birds that bathe frequently and spend hours grooming, especially after feeding on