San Diego Zoo Safari Park

This guide to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park follows the California condor, a bird that by 1982 had only twenty two individuals left alive anywhere on earth after decades of lead poisoning, gunshots and a shrinking range. It traces the drastic decision to trap every remaining wild condor and bring them to breeding pens built into these same hills, the six years that passed with nothing hatching, and the puppet-fed chicks keepers raised so the birds would never learn to trust a human hand. You'll hear what happened on a January morning in 1988 inside those pens. Right now you're riding a zipline over the same hillside where that gamble played out below the giraffes and rhinos.