What a Vulture Named Clarence Taught Marco Wendt About Trust

A rescued vulture, a childhood spent hiding half his identity, and thirty years at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance — on what it actually takes to earn trust from the animals, and people, who don't meet you halfway.

Clarence didn't like most people.

A Cinereous Vulture perched on a stump

He was a Cinereous Vulture — the largest vulture species in Europe and Asia — and when Marco Wendt met him, Marco was sixteen, working his first summer job at what was then called the Wild Animal Park outside San Diego. Clarence had a reputation.

"I don't want to make it seem like there's a deeper human connection with the wildlife I've been working with. These are still wild animals. But we built up a good rapport."

Not friendship. Marco is careful about that word. Trust, earned slowly, on the bird's terms, not his own. Thirty years later, he's a spokesperson for San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and the animals under his care are the ones people find hardest to love — cassowaries, vultures, flamingos, cranes. Not because they're dangerous, though some are. Because nobody projects easy affection onto a cassowary the way they do onto an elephant or a panda. Marco's job, in large part, is closing that gap.

Marco Wendt at work at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park

I didn't expect the conversation to go where it went next.

Marco is first-generation Mexican American, one of the only Mexican kids in his San Diego classroom growing up. He told me what that actually looked like:

"I would get ridiculed and made fun of a lot for being a Mexican child. I would get in trouble for speaking in Spanish."

Not corrected gently. Punished. He learned, without anyone saying it out loud, to be embarrassed of who he was. He hid it for years. What pulled him out wasn't a mentor or a program — it was a cartoon. Captain Planet, and a Latino character whose power was, of all things, heart.

Marco nose to beak with a bird of prey at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park

He got emotional telling me that. I don't think that's a small thing to admit on a podcast.

That thread — earning trust instead of assuming it, with a vulture or a classroom or a stranger — is the whole shape of this conversation. I told Marco something I don't say often: I spent fifteen years learning to speak Spanish professionally. Along this journey, there have been moments where I've realized that using Spanish made communities feel smaller, not closer. I asked him what real allyship looks like, the kind that doesn't feel tokenized. His answer was shorter than I expected.

"Sometimes in communities, you just have to listen."

[Listen to the full episode → https://open.spotify.com/show/033hSHBTnQghtWI68ktJNk?si=96a89e1eeefb4e72]

Marco working with a large bird of prey at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park during a visitor presentation

Learn more about Marco's work with San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance at sdzwa.org, and see some of the photos from his thirty years in this field at wildwardinstitute.net.

And if something in this conversation moves you — reach out. I'll keep collecting these stories as long as people keep living them.

— Scott

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at wildwardinstitute.net.

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