Sometime today, while a co-worker distracts two enormous, California condors with beaks strong enough to rip through cow hide, Kelli Walker plans to reach into the birds' nest box, snatch the fist-sized egg they've been incubating, and try to help it hatch.
Such is the high-drama life of the Oregon Zoo keeper charged with managing 38 condors, including 11 breeding pairs. Her job is particularly busy this year: The birds have laid 10 eggs, with one more possibly on the way -- the most since the zoo joined the effort to save the critically endangered species by opening the nation's fourth California condor captive-breeding operation in 2003.
Condor eggs incubate 54 to 58 days and typically take a few days to hatch.
When Walker last checked the first one due, the process had started, but the chick appeared stuck. She hopes that if she dampens the membrane, which is partly exposed, the chick will be able to rotate inside the egg and pop off the cap, hatching completely.
Walker just can't let the condor parents catch her in the act.
The birds are so hinky about interference in their nests, that if they sense a disturbance they might attack and kill the egg, or leave the nest and fail to return. "It's really bad juju," Walker said.
This year for the first time, the zoo plans to transfer at least two -- maybe four -- eggs to California, where they'll be placed in nests in the wild.
That doesn't mean things will be slow at the zoo's Jonsson Center for Wildlife Conservation, which sits in a tree-lined meadow in rural Clackamas County, a site off-limits to the public so that birds bound for release to the wild don't grow accustomed to people.
Though it is shipping some out, the zoo's program is taking in eggs laid at other captive-breeding sites, so Walker expects to see nine or 10 chicks hatch in the weeks ahead.
Among the center's breeding females, Ojai was first out of the gate, laying an egg on Jan. 28. The last was laid by Wiloq on March 14.
The ninth egg to arrive this season was the heaviest on record for the zoo, 326.9 grams or about 11 1/2 ounces.
Captive breeding is helping California condors wing back from the brink of extinction. In 1982, only 22 were known to exist in the wild, and in 1987 those that remained were captured in an attempt to save the species. Today, the population hovers around 370; at last count, about three months ago, 189 lived in captivity and 181 flew free.
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