But even nature’s ickier creatures experience the beauty of childbirth, and now you see it, too. For the first time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is live-streaming the early moments of a wild baby condor’s life from a California cliff to the world. The egg began cracking Monday morning, and a chick with downy white feathers emerged.

The hope is that the chick will survive to adulthood and bolster a growing but still fragile population of the critically endangered birds, which live in California, Arizona and Baja California.

“We hope [the livecam] will really raise awareness about these spectacular but highly endangered birds and the threats they face,” said Charles Eldermire, the bird cams manager at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, one of the organizations that partnered with Fish and Wildlife to broadcast the birth. “We know from past experience that people form a real emotional connection to the birds they see on the cams as they witness a part of nature they’ve never seen before.”

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The chick is hatching in a cliffside nest (of sorts; condors aren’t into cushy baby beds and usually just lay their eggs on dirt) at the Sespe Condor Sanctuary near Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in Ventura County, Calif.

The mom- and dad-to-be are known as Condor No. 111 and Condor No. 509. The pair have been going together since the fall of 2014, and it’s a very May-December kind of relationship — she’s 22, a product of captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park; he’s 7 and a wild-born bird.

But so far, their attempts to start a family have been tragic: Their first chick, #No. 793, was born in April 2015. But it died five months later from lead poisoning, the most common cause of death for wild California condors. A second egg went missing in March, and biologists believe it was snatched up by a predator.

Biologists rappelled into the nest in March and placed a dummy egg made of epoxy-based resin in its place, and the condor couple was evidently none the wiser. On Saturday, biologists swapped out the dummy with a real one that had been incubated at the Los Angeles Zoo. Once it hatches, the chick will be dependent on its parents for at least six months.

California condors are North America’s largest birds. Their wings, which are black with white patches on the underside, can span nine feet. Adults are so enormous that they have a hard time taking off and do so from cliffs or open fields where they can run downhill. They’re so big, in fact, that the Cornell Lab offers this tip to those trying to identify one flying in the wild: “Check their proportions to help rule out buteos, eagles and small planes.” (Emphasis added.)

Once in flight, they’re master gliders, rarely flapping their vast wings. The danger to condors is on the ground.

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Because they feed on hunted carrion, California condors frequently ingest ammunition. And most hunting ammunition is made of lead, which can poison the birds.

By the early 1980s, lead poisoning and habitat loss had caused the birds’ population to shrink to 22. To prevent their extinction, federal biologists captured all remaining wild condors in 1987, began breeding them in zoos and gradually releasing some to the wild. There are now about 430 California condors today, half of which live in the wild.

But California condors are still totally dependent on human intervention. Wildlife biologists put out lead-free carcasses for them to dine on. The birds are captured twice a year and tested for lead, which nearly one-third of them have been shown to have in their blood at levels that cause health problems.

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California became the first state to ban lead ammunition in 2013, but conservationists say the condors won’t be able to self-sustain until it’s not sold anywhere. That’s strongly opposed by hunting and gun rights groups, which argue that alternatives are far more expensive and bans are a slippery slope that could lead to gun controls.