Thoughts on the Work-Up and Holding a Condor for the First Time

The whole process is oddly, yet necessarily, intimate. Here you are, clustered around this creature—this breathing heavily, whipping its head around, kicking its legs creature. Your fingers encircle its straining beak; your arm presses down against its back, your hand grips its wing. When you draw blood—for lead and West Nile testing—you put pressure on the pinprick after, this heart-racing, hot feet creature’s blood staining your fingers. Your coworkers’ faces are close to yours, so close. Hands touch where hands wouldn’t normally touch: put pressure here, here where my thumb is. Hold the wing here, slide your hand over mine. You lean over someone to tie off the dental floss that marries the transmitter to the shaft of the feather to which it is attached.  Someone puts a hand on your knee, sets tools in your lap. It is awkward, with so many people, so many things to do, everything centered on this one creature, who may or may not try to catch you off guard, too comfortable in your tenuous hold on the loose skin of its head, on the folded powerful wings that can carry a twenty-pound bird aloft in the sky.

In the parallel universe where things had gone just a butterfly's wingflap differently, there might not be a single condor left for me to hold. But here in this one, I can look her in the eye, and it is pretty magical.