Last week my Texas niece, her husband, and their children came to Phoenix for a whirlwind fifty-five hour visit. Since their kids had never been to Arizona, we crammed an Arizona experience into a very tight time frame, including a dip in my 68-degree swimming pool, a hike in the Mountain Preserve, dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and a trip to the zoo.

Now, the zoo trip did not focus on primarily on the lions, tigers, and monkeys, but on the fauna indigenous to the desert. My five-year-old great nephew, D-Dog, particularly enjoyed the creepy crawly exhibit of snakes, lizards, scorpions, and such, which he explained to me in great detail. (I wouldn’t have known, since I refuse to look at those creatures.) His sister liked the roadrunner who was munching on a white mouse and the Mexican wolves who were devouring rabbit entrails.

I was dawdling along attempting to avoid being caught in the midst of an elementary school trip when I saw it. At first, I thought it was a submerged black bear when it suddenly rose out of the man-made creek and took to the air, flapping its wings and dousing me with water. WTH is that? A freaking California Condor with an over eight-foot wing span. Now even though this massive bird was in a netted habitat I ducked. I flashed back to my terror of watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Admittedly, I was less worried about having my eyes pecked out than I was of it snatching me in his talons and carrying me off to Papago Buttes.

Of course, D-Dog was most amused by his great aunt’s fear, and he even had the audacity to label me a fraidy cat. I’m okay with that; I’m just happy to have survived and lived to write about my condor encounter. In fact, this old gal is happy to have survived their whirlwind visit.