An incredible journey from a cliff-top cave in backcountry Big Sur to the Los Angeles Zoo—and back.

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Under the smog-smudged Los Angeles skyline, in a gated compound deep within the Los Angeles Zoo just over a mile from the pretzel-like overpasses of Highway 5, animal keepers monitored the progress of six breeding pairs of California condors, a rotating group of juvenile condors, and—at this moment—seven condor eggs.

Inside a trailer, keepers Mike Clark and Chandra David watched a trio of monitors. Clark used a joystick to direct a camera in the nearby breeding pen. He spotted a pair of condors neck wrestling. He switched to another camera that captured a condor raising its wings like a vampire.

Clark then took me and Burnett into a quarantined trailer where the eggs were being incubated. Before entering, we submerged the soles of our shoes into a pan filled with disinfectant. Once inside, Clark informed us not to touch anything and then sprayed an antiseptic on a counter in the small room, which resembles a hospital’s examination room. After wiping down the counter and tossing the dirtied paper towels near the door for disposal, Clark rinsed his hands with iodine and pulled some disposable plastic gloves over his hands.  “An egg’s biggest enemy is bacteria,” he said.

He walked over to a large wooden incubator about the size of a washing machine. Stuck to a glass window on the front of the contraption was a pink Post-It note identifying the egg inside as the one from Big Sur. The incubator was set to 98 degrees and the room felt as humid as a streamroom.

Clark said that controlling the humidity in the room and the incubator allowed scientists to control the water loss inside the egg. He told me that when an egg is laid, it weighs roughly half a pound, and is the size and shape of an avocado. Over the next 54 days, it is normal for condor eggs to lose 14 to 14.5 percent of their weight as water evaporates through the porous shell. If much more weight is lost, the embryo might be too dehydrated and weak to hatch. If less water is lost, the embryo could become too big to place itself in the correct hatching position. “Better hatchability is achieved through better weight loss,” Clark said.

When the egg laid in Big Sur arrived at the Los Angeles Zoo, there was one thing about it that caused Clark to be concerned: “It looked like it had lost a lot of weight for how old it was,” he said.

The Big Sur egg also had a few small craters on its surface. Clark said the scientists filled in the indentations using Elmer’s glue—a common procedure.

Clark became passionate when explaining that the scientists at the facility will do anything within their means to ensure that a chick is born. “It’s not important that they hatch their own egg,” he said. “It’s important they reproduce.”

Both Clark and Burnett would like to meddle with the condor’s natural processes as little as possible. But at this time in the recovery program, they must be hands-on with the captive and wild condor populations. Later, Burnett told me that since mankind drove the birds to near extinction, he feels it is mankind’s duty to get the species back up and running again.

Another egg sat a few feet away inside another incubator, scheduled to go to Big Sur. That egg had been laid by a condor in the LA Zoo’s breeding facility on Feb. 10, and the VWS biologists believed it had a strong chance of surviving. Burnett hoped to be able to deliver the egg to the remote backcountry nest in two days.

Clark opened the incubator and pulled out a drawer with the captive-bred egg in it. He carefully placed the drawer on the counter and delicately put the egg, which had “Big Sur” written on its shell in pencil, on a scale. “Seems like it’s on target,” Burnett said. “Yep, it’s 14.5.” Clark confirmed the measurement.

The parents of this egg are a female named Malibu and a 41 year-old male named Topatopa, the oldest known living condor. (Both entered the program before the practice of naming the birds was discontinued, in the late ‘90s.) The mating pair also produced the egg that Number 208 hatched from.

“To ensure the best success for this nest,” Burnett said, “we chose an egg from a very proven successful pair in captivity. We want to give them the best opportunity that we can.”

Clark took the egg over to a device called a candler, a slide projector-like piece of equipment that allows scientists to peer into the embryo without having to puncture the shell. Burnett flipped on the light switch as Clark pointed the top portion of the egg toward the piercing light. While the top of the egg seemed to glow like a light bulb, the base appeared darker, crisscrossed with red lines that looked like veins.

Clark confirmed that the red lines are in fact veins. The top of the egg appeared white due to an air pocket that had formed there.

This air cell is crucial because 53 days after the egg is laid, the chick should stick its beak into the air inside the egg to start breathing for the first time with its own lungs—a process called “internal pipping.” Just 24 hours later, the chick will have used up all the air at the top of the egg. Becoming desperate, the chick will start “external pipping,” poking a hole through the shell to access the air on the outside. This hatching process usually unfolds over three days.

As Clark held the egg near the candler, a portion of the darkened section pulsed rhythmically, like a beating heart. “It’s showing respiration,” he said. “It’s not showing typical beak movement. It could be good. It could be bad.”