Grounded

One of the television programmes I remember best was The Flight of the Condor - a view of the stunning landscape of the Andes seen from the perspective of the condor, the largest bird of prey in the world, soaring above.

The musical accompaniment was Andean pan pipes and although I was astonished to find out that the programme was first shown in 1985 it has stayed in my mind ever since. The glorious scenery and the huge, majestic condors took me into another world.

Here's the Andean condor I saw this week at Lotherton Hall Bird Garden:

For some reason it decided to feed us on grass: it kept picking up chunks of grass and poking it through the bars at us, in a strange parody of what human beings usually do in such situations.

The aviary where the condor and its partner live is, at first sight, huge. But when you see the condor you can see that the aviary may be huge by aviary standards, but it's tiny by Andean mountain standards. Because the condor is so big, it could fly from one end to the other in two flaps of its wings.

The condor is endangered in the wild for a variety of reasons - habitat loss, less dead meat about, killing a condor being a sign of manhood - and Lotherton Hall Bird Garden hopes that they will be able to breed them and hence increase the bird's numbers. Though I have seen condors in that cage for years and there is no information as to whether the birds have ever actually bred.

All right, it's mankind that's causing the condor to decrease in numbers, so we ought to do something about it. But to see a condor kept in those conditions, with people - adults as well as children - pointing "Ooh, look at that funny bird" - I don't like to see it, it's like seeing elephants in a circus.

If Lotherton Hall is regularly returning birds to the Andes and setting them free in a protected area so they have some chance of survival, then fair enough, it might just be worth it. Otherwise, I think the pretence of helping the wild population is just an excuse to have a whopping great bird on display for the public to goggle at, and I think that's wrong.