You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

On the morning of May 3rd, Tiana Williams' class in Gata Pufordon drove to a hilltop

in Redwood National Park and tiptoed into a small box of a building connected to a giant

metal cage.

She put on a headset and started live streaming.

Tiana's a wildlife biologist and the director of the URAC tribe Wildlife Department,

and the California Condor is central to her people.

They call the birds Preganij and the tribe is spent years working to bring them back to

Northern California.

They look like big vultures, except their bare heads are black, at least when they're young,

and they have these colors of fluffy black feathers.

When we talked with Tiana recently, she said these birds used to soar from Baja to British

Columbia, feeding on the carcasses of big dead animals.

They're kind of like the the boss bird of decomposition, they will open up these carcasses

that otherwise will just sit there and blow, not only feeding themselves, but also making

the food bio-available to the other vultures and scavenging community within the region.

It's actually producing more food by having the condors come here to eat this food.

Then European settlers arrived.

Unfortunately, Condor's near extinction seems to be mostly human-caused, particularly

with the huge influx of people who came in with the California Gold Rush in the 1850s.

There's major overharvest of the game species that relied on those large elk and deer

and whales and sea lions.

...