For Alta Magazine, I wrote an ode to the California condor:
I don’t know when I started looking for California condors in the sky. It must have been when I was a child growing up in Humboldt County, before I understood that the vultures were, at the time, extinct in the wild. I only knew they were rare and exciting creatures—the largest land birds in North America, their wingspans reaching 10 feet. With youthful hubris, I believed I was the special one to whom they would reveal themselves, and when they did, I’d be watching. Of course that never happened, but I still check for a condor whenever a large black shadow circles above me. It’s almost always a turkey vulture.
Check out Condors: Lords of the Fly.