Condor's Gut

Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life has an interesting post on the current state of the California Condor. An excerpt about an ailing condor chick:

After transporting the chick to the Los Angeles Zoo, and following a three-hour operation, an astounding amount of material was removed from the ventriculus and proventriculus of the condor chick. The following items were among the debris removed from the chick: 4 bottle caps and a screw top, 3 electrical fittings, 5 washers, 13 22-caliber shell-casings, 1 38-caliber shell-casing, a shotgun-shell, several pieces of plastic bags, about a quarter cup of broken glass and a similar amount of broken plastic, a few small pieces of fabric, 4 small stones, a metal bracket, a piece of wire, and a few small pieces of rubber.

Fortunately, it did not appear that any of this remarkable collection of detritus perforated the gut, and currently the chick appears to be doing well.

The ponder is this: what led the chick's parents to feed it all this junk? Is it just that one of the parents is particularly attracted to shiny things? Or is it a characteristic of the species?

The author of the post (Jerry W. Davis) doesn't answer that question, but he does mention how well, in general, the condors are doing. I may be guilty of over-simplifying the issue here, but ... it seems to me that if the condor recovery is going well, with an increasing population, then ... it's probably true that the condors are not full of shiny metal and glass junk. I hope my logic is correct!