Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things Read Online Free Page B

I’d have been
thinking,
I’d have said I was sick and had to go home. But I was a
moron
and said, “I just don’t really get it, that’s all.”
    â€œGet what?”
    â€œWell, how you track condors, for one thing. Is the Lookout like a radio control tower? Like at an airport?”
    â€œGood analogy. Only it’s not nearly as sophisticated.”
    â€œOr as tall!” Bella called from the backseat.
    â€œOr as easy to get to!” Gabby groaned as we thumped and bumped over a really bad pothole.
    â€œBut
how
do you track them? Do they have a chip implanted in them?”
    Robin took another careful turn. “Again, the same idea, but not as sophisticated. The condors have a transmitter and numbered tags attached to their wings; they don’t bother them a bit.”
    â€œBut
why
do you track them? What good does it do?”
    â€œIn the Pleistocene age there were thousands of condors in the wild. By 1890 that number was down to six hundred, and it continued to dwindle until 1983, when the population was a paltry twenty-two.”
    â€œWere people hunting them?”
    â€œPeople weren’t hunting them, but hunting
is
what caused part of the problem. Condors are nature’s cleanup crew. They eat animals that have died of natural causes, as well as gut piles left behind by hunters. They
also
eat carcasses of animals that have been poisoned by people who considered them to be pests. And if a condor eats poisonous lead from bullets or poison that was in a dead animal’s system, it kills the condor, too.
    â€œThere was also a problem with pesticides like DDT, which made condor eggs so thin-shelled that they were easily crushed. And since condors breed slowly—one chick every two years, or thereabouts—and since they don’t reproduce until they’re about six years old, the population fell dramatically. By the late 1980s there were
no
condors left in the wild. The few birds remaining were in captivity.” She glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “They were really,
really
close to extinction.”
    I thought about all of this, then said, “I don’t even know what one looks like.”
    â€œYou
don’t
?” everyone cried. Like
I
was the dumb one.
    So I scowled around the van and said, “How am I supposed to know what a condor looks like? There are only twenty-two of them, and we don’t exactly have a
zoo
in Santa Martina. . . .”
    â€œThere’s more than twenty-two now,” Bella said.
    â€œYeah!” Gabby chimed in. “And there’s pictures all over the Web.”
    Bella nodded. “And there’s one hanging at the Natural History Museum.”
    â€œYeah! It’s been up for a year. Didn’t your school go there on a field trip?”
    God, they were driving me crazy. And then Robin says, “Here,” and hands me a pamphlet from the front seat. Can you believe that? They’re handing out
pamphlets
like they want to convert me to their birdbrain religion.
    Join the Condor Cult!
    Sacrifice your summer!
    Worship the Mighty Feathered Ones!
    Man, was I stuck or what?
    But really, what could I do?
    I took the stupid pamphlet, and when I turned it face-up, what did I see?
    The single
ugliest
bird imaginable. Big hunchy black body, bald, bloated red head and face, and what looks like a little black feather boa around its blotchy red neck.
    â€œThat’s a condor?” I choke out.
    â€œIt’s got an almost ten-foot wingspan,” Robin says. “An eagle can have up to a seven-foot wingspan, so that gives you some idea of how magnificent the condor is.”
    My eyes were bugging out at the brochure. How could she think this bird was
magnificent
? That was like calling a barracuda beautiful. So what if it had big wings? I couldn’t believe that
this
was what all the fuss was about. That
this
was worth building tracking stations for.
    What was
wrong
with these