developed. They routinely test the birds for lead poisoning—condors that
scavenge deer carcasses often ingest lead shot—and they have treated
many of them with chelation therapy. Several condors have been taken in
for chelation more than once. The effort to save the whooping crane has
involved even more man-hours, most provided by volunteers. Each year,
a team of pilots flying ultralight aircraft teaches a new cohort of captive-
raised crane chicks how to migrate south for the winter, from Wisconsin
to Florida. The journey of nearly thirteen hundred miles can take up to
three months, with dozens of stops on private land that owners give over
to the birds. Millions of Americans who don’t participate directly in such
efforts support them indirectly, by joining groups like the World Wildlife
Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, Defenders of Wildlife, the Wildlife
Conservation Society, the African Wildlife Foundation, the Nature
Conservancy, and Conservation International.
Wouldn’t it be better, practically and ethically, to focus on what can
be done and is being done to save species, rather than to speculate
gloomily about a future in which the biosphere is reduced to little plastic
vials? The director of a conservation group in Alaska once put it to me
this way: “People have to have hope. I have to have hope. It’s what keeps
us going.”
NEXT door to the Institute for Conservation Research there’s a similar
looking, dun-colored building that serves as a veterinary hospital. Most of
the animals in the hospital, which is also run by the San Diego Zoo, are
only passing through, but the building has a permanent resident, too: a
Hawaiian crow named Kinohi. Kinohi is one of about a hundred Hawaiian
crows, or `alalā, that exist today, all of them in captivity. While in San
Diego, I paid a visit to Kinohi with the zoo’s director of reproductive
physiology, Barbara Durrant, who, I’d been told, was the only person who
really understands him. On our way over to see the bird, Durrant stopped
off at a commissary of sorts to pick up a selection of his favorite snacks.
These included mealworms; a hairless, newborn mouse, known as a