Ever interested in the language that humans choose when discussing the California condor, here I consider items published with the word “comeback” in the title. These span several decades.
Comeback
Tag: Words
The name in many languages
On 5 March 1858, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal about the value of learning the common names for species in another language:
In proportion as I understood the language, I saw them from a new point of view.
With this in mind, here are translations of the English-language name California condor into 21 other languages.
Protect
The words that humans choose when discussing the California condor reflect how we perceive these birds and our attitudes toward them. In this post, I consider the word “protect” in its various forms.
As a grammatical modifier
While stumbling around my bibliography about the California condor, I have noticed that there are condors and then there are “condor things”. This post is about the latter.
#1’s name?
In 1967, an emaciated young condor was taken to the Los Angeles Zoo for rehabilitation. After receiving expert care, the condor was released into the wild but watched closely. The young bird did not thrive and the decision was made to recapture and provide a permanent home for the bird at the zoo.
The bird in question is, according to the studbook that lists every individual California condor on Earth, California condor #1.
But #1 is hardly a suitable name for “one of the most, if not the most, genetically valuable California condor in the world” – that’s according to Los Angeles Zoo Curator of Birds Mike Maxey, as quoted in the Fall 2016 issue of Zoo View magazine. That 3-year-old article also reported that #1 had so far fathered 34 chicks!
Condor #1 does have a “real” name but there is some ambiguity surrounding that name. Here’s the story.
