California Condor

That's awesome.

While hiking in Big Sur a few years ago we passed an elderly gentleman with a pair of binoculars. I stopped to ask what he was looking at. "Condor", he said.

So I pulled out my own binoculars, pointed them up at the ridge, and saw what looked like a turkey vulture flying through a mob of crows. Then I realized that the "crows" were actually turkey vultures themselves, and the "vulture" was the biggest flying bird I'd ever seen. Condor, indeed. Those things are enormous.

#1, I had a similar experience back in the summer of 1978 near Ojai. Standing near the top of a ridge, looking out over a valley, I noticed a big soaring bird in the distance and watched it really semi-consciously for several seconds. Then it moved its head or something and all of a sudden the scale snapped into focus and I realized it was soaring over the *next* valley and was absolutely enormous. I still vividly remember the sudden shock of realizing where and what it was.

ZOMG! It's a top secret stealth-bomber condor. You can tell by the numbers under its wings!

When I first saw this bird, I thought it couldn't be a condor; they must live in the parts of the canyon far away from people. However, one of the rangers confirmed that it was a condor.
There's a formation called the Battleship which has a cave on the side away from the South Rim. The ranger said that a pair has been nesting there for a few years. After the end of the first nesting season, a scientist climbed the Battleship and rappelled down to the cave to investigate. He found eggshell, indicating that the pair had laid but not hatched a chick. He also found condor bones that were dated to 7000 years old. So the birds released in the Canyon quickly found where their ancestors had lived. The pair has since successfully raised at least on chick.