Peter Fimrite
Published 5:03 pm, Tuesday, May 6, 2014
The big, black vulture, its yellowish-orange eyes bulging, stared at its visitors through a tiny window in the enclosure at the Oakland Zoo.
It was a penetrating look, as if the bird knew something that you didn't know. Unusual intelligence is, in fact, a characteristic of the California condor, said Andrea Goodnight, the associate veterinarian at the zoo.
"She knows we are here," whispered Goodnight about No. 444, the first lead-poisoned bird to be treated at the zoo's new Condor Recovery Center. "They are very smart birds."
The 16-pound bird, with a 9.5-foot wingspan, was driven to the Oakland zoo on Thursday from Pinnacles National Park after field biologists captured her and tests detected high levels of lead in her blood.
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