“As Congress continues to mull over sweeping changes in the Endangered Species Act and the Wise Use movement continues to fight reintroduction, the future of federal intervention on behalf of rare plants and animals may be determined by the direction the condor takes.”

—Todd Wilkinson, National Parks, May/June 1996.

An eighty-three-year-old man living in a remote mountain town in California heard strange noises upstairs in his bedroom and climbed the stairs to investigate. What he saw amazed him: Eight huge black birds had torn through the screen door and were wreaking havoc in his bedroom. Les Reid, the man whose home was broken into, said of his discovery, “I wasn’t mad, I was just astonished.”

The birds that Reid found in his home in 1999 were California condors, part of a flock of 29 birds that were bred in captivity and then reintroduced into...