She just happened to be the 884th bird
in the program, so that's her number.
They hatch out white, they have white down,
their heads are really pale, they have giant eyeballs.
I think they're pretty cute,
but they're kinda ugly.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong.
Condors only lay one egg every year
or every other year and when you have one egg,
and that's all you're gonna get out of this pair,
we need to take as good care of it as we can.
The parents don't really know that we
switched it out, so they're incubating an egg.
There's a few reasons we pull the egg
into the incubator, one is to see if it's fertile,
then we can also see how the embryo is positioned
in the egg, if it's turned we may anticipate problems
later on, or if something's not developing right.
We saw the egg was getting ready to hatch.
Behind the scenes we were able to open a little door
in the nest room and we just put that egg,
that hatching egg in there and pulled the dummy egg out.
Occasionally, it happens that the parents
fight in the nest room, it's normal, but sometimes
they will kick the egg accidentally.
Unfortunately, the pair we put this egg under
was not getting along well and we did have to separate
the female fairly soon in the process.
He would go down and eat himself really fast
so that chick didn't get chilled, and then he would come
up and feed it and sit on it and make sure it was warm.
Once we hit like day 10, the chick is fine,
it's being fed, it's where I'm like, "we got this."
He reached his peak fluffiness!
The fluff's flying everywhere and you go in to catch
'em up and they're really angry at you, so yeah you
have a giant ball of angry fluff like, trying to
attack your leg, and you're like, "really?"
They have no idea what to do with these giant wings
that they've got that actually make up a large part
of their body weight.
A lot of times they'll jump around and they'll flap
and they'll flap and then they'll like tip over.
It takes 'em a long time to get used to how these
things are supposed to be used.
At about four months old, which is a little bit early,
she went out on the ledge in front of the nest room
and she would actually go up and down her ramp, her log,
into the pen and she would go explore and then she would
be done in a couple hours and she would walk back
up the ramp and be on her ledge.
That's not what usually happens.
She was inquisitive, she wasn't shy.
- We actually gather all the chicks up in to this area so
they form a cohort and they get used to each other and
they're also given their last exam,
a wing tag is put on 'em.
- We watched her grow from an embryo, and you're always
just like, "oh, you know, there's milestones and you're
super happy when you see them, but then you just kinda
have to let 'em go."
- Everything that we wanted to see happen, happened and
she's in the wild and she's doing fine.
She holds her own, she's intelligent, she can be fierce
when she needs to.
Eventually I think when she gets old enough,
she will find a mate and they will have their own
breeding territory and they will be able to raise chicks.
That's the most you can hope for.