day 4: The condors

I'm going to rewind a little bit, before our hike and tie this post in with the hike at the same time.
On our fourth day still, Laura talked to us about the Condors. They became endangered in the 80s. Scientists tried saving the bird species by breeding them in safe environments.
The eventual result was that the Condors slowly grew, to the point where there are at least 80 in the canyon today.

After we dressed Landon up as a condor (which was a hilarious event in itself), Laura talked about the radios which each condor has. I guess after a new condor is born, a radio gets attached to their wings which allows the park service to track their location. There are receivers which can pick these signals up if a condor is near by.
Laura had one of these. It was very cool looking, consisting of a receiver and an antenna. You would wave the antenna around like a wand and push the next button to switch to the next channel. On the hike, we took turns with waving the antenna or pushing the scan button. Sadly, we did not find any Condors flying around in the area - but it was still fun!

Bryan also had his bat detector. There were many bats in the canyon, and you could here their thin "ceek" sound as they flew overhead. Since Bryan was very much into researching bats (he did a very interesting study on them in the past), he had a bat detector. Towards the end of our hike, he took it out and let us use it.
That was more of a success, since there were many bats flying by. The radio would make small clicks as their ultrasounds scanned the area.