FILLMORE, Calif. -- Every Thursday, Bill Langford heads to the grassy hills above Fillmore, Calif., pulls out his spotting scope and spends eight hours monitoring each flick and flitter of a pair of California condors raising a young chick.

Sitting on a camouflage chair a half-mile from the nest, Langford marks when the chick flaps its wings and demands to be fed, when the parents preen their feathers, when they sleep and when they fly and every other subtle movement.

Langford is one part of a larger team working nonstop to watch over this and three other condor nests in the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, the heart and soul of the California condor recovery effort.

The process is extraordinarily labor intensive and expensive, and it needs to be examined to determine how to continue to adequately care for the birds that were once the poster children for the Endangered Species Act, according to a recent report. Click here for the full story.

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