Condor 336 hatched at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park in April 2004. She was released at Pinnacles National Monument three years ago. On Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008 biologists with the Ventana Wildlife Society were monitoring the condors in Big Sur, California. Immediately they knew something was wrong with No. 336. Over the course of three days they attempted to catch the bird to perform a health evaluation. On Sept. 5, in cooperation with the National Parks Service, a Ventana biologist caught the condor. She was rushed for veterinary care in Monterey and later transported to the Los Angeles Zoo where veterinarians have successfully treated condors for lead poisoning.

A few days later condor 336 died. The bird had already been underweight by the time she was caught. Her health had been compromised badly and she was not able to recover despite the heroic efforts of the biologists and veterinarians. Her death is not a loss for the California Condor Recovery Program. It is a loss for Californians and for North America.

The California condor is North America’s largest bird. This species was found from British Columbia to Baja California, Mexico when pioneers arrived on our shores. The birds began to loose ground quickly. The population dwindled to approximately 20 birds in the 1980s, but thanks to the efforts of conservationists and biologists the number has increased to more than 300 birds today. For this reason the loss of one bird hurts the efforts of this species’ recovery, but it should also affect us. We’ve made every effort to recover the California condor so let’s protect it and help reduce problems like lead poisoning from our environment.

To learn more about how lead poisoning affects the condor, click here.

Ventana Wildlife Society is the only not-for-profit organization releasing and managing condors in the wild in California. Your help is urgently needed at this time to help us overcome the setback of the fire and continue the momentum of restoring condors to their natural habitat.

As of today, our biologists have been able to track the radio signals from all but one of the 43 free-flying adult condors that VWS has surviving in the central California region. As for the newly hatched chicks, one of three wild nests was in a burned area, although we don’t yet know the fate of the chick inside. Two other nests were very near the fire but the chicks inside survived. On July 8, we were finally able to review the damages and determine that we lost all of the field pens in Big Sur for releasing the young condors along with important equipment.

Please consider making a generous gift to the Condor Emergency Fund at VWS. With your partnership, we can replace our lost equipment and supplies and support our biologists and loyal volunteers at this challenging time. In the months ahead, we will rebuild the condor release program as well as protect and maintain the health and safety of the wild flock in Big Sur. You can help us now by going to www.ventanaws.org or calling toll-free 877-897-7740 and pledging your support.

As a member, you will receive continued updates on the progress the California condors as well as our other projects to protect and restore wildlife and their habitats. It is thanks to the past generosity of our supporters and to partnerships with other dedicated organizations that visitors from all over the world now see wild condors soaring above the mountains of Big Sur. Our vision is to see this flock grow and prosper so it becomes permanent and self-sustaining – and no longer endangered.

Kelly Sorenson, Executive Director

Ventana Wildlife Society

Our sixth chick hatched this season needed a little keeper help getting out of its shell. We had noticed early on during development that the embryo was positioned incorrectly inside the egg. On day 54 of incubation, the egg was taken to the Harter Veterinary Medical Center, here on grounds, and was radio graphed to determine the position of the chick. The x-ray film confirmed that the chick in fact was positioned upside-down inside the egg and gave us a good idea of where the chick might first break the eggshell and start breathing fresh air.

When getting ready to hatch, chicks normally first break the shell, or “pip,” towards the rounder end of the egg. Since this chick was completely upside-down it actually pipped towards the pointier end. We monitored it around the clock for three days and observed that, even though it was very active and vocal, the chick had made no more progress towards hatching. At 72 hours from the time it had pipped, two of us keepers very carefully removed the eggshell from around the chick and excitedly welcomed it into the world. This sixth chick is named Awexa (say “ah-WE-ha”), which means “Bee” in Chumash. Awexa is eating and growing very well. This chick is being puppet-raised and will hopefully be released in Baja California, Mexico, along with its older sibling, Aqshwalaw, as well as Sitow and Yinci, our other 2008 puppet-raised chicks.

Our last egg of the season was placed back with its parents, Towich (condor No. 135) and Sulu (condor No. 52) after it pipped, and finished hatching (with Sulu’s assistance). This chick is named Sola (say “SO-lah”), which means “Soda” in Chumash. Towich and Sulu are very attentive parents and are doing a wonderful job raising their 5^th chick hatched since they were paired together for the 2004 breeding season.

All of our new chicks are doing great, and they are keeping us keepers and their parents very busy. DNA samples have been submitted for our chicks to determine their gender. The next milestone for our chicks is to leave the nest and fledge. This happens at about 150 days old, depending on each individual and on the way each is raised. This has been an amazing season for our condors and their keepers; let’s hope it continues to be a great year.

Consequently, the wind conditions within a condor’s habitat are likely one of the principle determinants of condor foraging ability, which is why condor introduction programs have been sited in mountainous regions with strong updrafts. Enhanced understanding of the meteorological conditions that determine the flying ability and foraging success of condors is vital to tailoring reintroduction programs to the bird’s habitat needs. No formal analysis of the characteristics of the winds that shape condor movements has yet been conducted.

We recently installed the first of an array of remote weatherstations that will be placed throughout the expanding ranges of the condors that are being reintroduced to Baja California, Mexico. The units include an anemometer to measure wind speed and direction and a thermometer to measure air temperature. The weather data is stored in a data recorder and can be downloaded at the end of the recording period (limited to about six months of memory capacity) using a handheld shuttle. Rather than choosing arbitrary locations, the sites where the weatherstation are to be installed were selected by overlaying the home ranges of 14 birds that were GPS-tracked for three years. This way the climate data we record will be taken from habitats that have actually been used intensively by the birds themselves. The big challenge to our team is that the weatherstation sites are in very remote and inaccessible areas, which presents considerable logistic difficulties for equipment installation and data acquisition.

The site for the installation of our first weatherstation was only half a mile from the Baja base camp, which certainly made it easy for us to carry the units and all of the equipment needed to set them up. Once at the site we selected a suitable tree on which to mount the weather sensors. The stations must be installed well off the ground to sample the strongest wind flows while minimizing ground-based turbulence and interference. We also need the units to be high enough to deter interference by curious animals (and curious people!). We needed climbing ropes and harnesses to bolt the unit 33 feet (10 meters) off the ground onto the main trunk of the tree. This was not an easy task, and was complicated by the fact that each unit must also be precisely calibrated to compass directions, often while the units were recording wind velocities of more than 33 feet (10 meters) per second.

The second weatherstation was placed at Venado Blanco, at the crest of a steep ridge overlooking a series of valleys back toward the condor campsite, which was about three miles to the southwest. The reintroduced condors have been tracked coming to this site many times over the past three years, and during our journey to the site we encountered a herd of deer and noticed the hoof prints of cattle and scats from various animals – the kinds of things that attract inquisitive and hungry condors. Getting to the Venado Blanco site required some serious off-roading and a hike with the weatherstations and their installation equipment across steep chaparral covered slopes.

The site itself was a picturesque study in contrasts, with colorful desert flowers in bloom beneath blackened pine trees that had been scarred by numerous lightening strikes and wildfires. The frequent storm activity in the area is of particular concern, since a high voltage blast of static electricity could have some serious negative consequences for one of our little weatherstations! To reduce the possibility of lightening strike we grounded our units to a long copper rod that we hammered into the ground. Needless to say, trying to find sufficient earth in which to hammer a six-foot rod into in a rocky granite peak also presented a physical challenge.

The remaining weatherstations are soon to be installed across the remote eastern canyons of the Baja reintroduction site that face the open deserts towards the Gulf of California. This network of canyons includes Picacho Del Diablo, which is the steepest peak in Baja. The sheer difficulty of reaching these sites necessitates the incorporation of a remote data uplink system into the weatherstations, to beam the climate data directly to us via a satellite modem. Once installed, we will be able to access the weather information provided by the units via the Internet. By matching the wind conditions and air temperatures with the movement patterns of the ranging condors we will be able to build an extensive and accurate picture of the environmental factors that shape condor habitat use and foraging success. This is another example of how cutting-edge technology can contribute highly valuable information to enhance management programs designed to conserve threatened species.

Nest guarding means that we have chosen to take an active and direct role in increasing chances of successfully fledging chicks from wild nests. This effort increases the number of wild fledged condors in the population and increases chances of future nests’ success by the breeding pairs. These wild fledge chicks tend to integrate into the wild population quicker than their counterparts raised at the breeding centers, due to being led by their parents from their natal areas and guided out to forage sites. Entering nest sites to prevent failures also allows us to collect important information about why and how nest failure has taken place in the past. This information will be crucial to discovering long-term solutions to the breakdown in nesting attempts and further aid in recovery of the species in the wild.

The first two interventions needed have been in the form of egg transplants. An egg transplant is the process by which an unhealthy or infertile egg is removed from the nest and replaced with a model or dummy egg. This dummy egg keeps the pair attentive to the nest until a healthy egg from one of the breeding centers begins to hatch. This hatching egg is quickly swapped out with the model egg. The pair then becomes the foster parents of a new chick, which usually finishes hatching in a day or two. Allowing the pairs to continue in their nesting attempt increases chances of success in future years because they can continue to gain experience in chick rearing behaviors and strengthen the bond they share as parents.

The first egg transplant occurred at the nest of condors 79 and 247. Having performed a fertility check on this first-time pair we were hopeful that this pair’s egg would hatch on its own, but this was not the case. After observers failed to see it hatch beyond its due date, a nest entry team was sent in to take a closer look. This team consisted of Mike Clark, a Los Angeles Zoo condor handler and I.

During the hatching process, the chick can sometimes become incapable of freeing itself from the confines of its shell and the condor parents assist in this process. If this was the case on this entry we could also assist in the process, unfortunately when we arrived at the nest we found that the egg’s development was interrupted before it came close to hatching. This can occur for a number of reasons and our best chance of determining why would be to collect the egg and take a closer look by sending the egg to the San Diego Zoo’s Pathology Lab.

We left a dummy egg for condor No. 79, who took to it like it was her own (see video below). I returned the following day with an egg from the Los Angeles Zoo that was beginning to hatch. On March 28, a day and a half after completing the transplant the first wild chick of the season was hatched and the parents are dutifully caring for the young condor.

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Condors 107 and 161 chose a difficult nest to observe this season. The cavity is very dark and when the birds enter it they disappear from view. The egg is never visible so an entry was necessary in order to determine hatch. After a few days past the hatch date we entered the nest to check. While we anticipated finding a chick, unfortunately the egg had also failed to hatch. We contacted our partners at the breeding facilities to locate the next available egg that would be ready to hatch to place into this nest site. It took transporting an egg all the way from the Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise Idaho.

This egg was due to hatch 20 days beyond the pair’s original egg’s hatch date. Incubating condors will usually tend their nest beyond the normal period of 57 days that it takes a condor egg to hatch but their behavior can become less and less predictable as time passes. There was a risk the pair would lose interest and abandon the dummy egg so nest observers closely tracked the behavior of the pair to determine whether they were showing any signs of abandonment.

The route to this nest site is one of the most challenging to access especially when having to take extra care in transporting a hatching egg. Condor country is some of the most difficult terrain to travel through on foot. The steep canyons scattered with poison oak often require ropes to bypass, and the thick vegetation can force you to a crawl for hundreds of meters through thick chaparral and shrub lands. Dropping many hundreds of feet in elevation down one side of a canyon and climbing up the other side to position ourselves above the nest was a difficult endeavor. Luckily, the nest was a short 20 foot rappel down a 200 foot cliff.

The nest cavity is one of the largest I’ve ever seen. It is close to 20 feet at it deepest and 15 feet at it’s widest. There are spots that I was able to stand up completely straight inside the nest cave. It is no wonder we could not see the egg as it was far back inside the cavity. The female perches in a nearby tree closely watching me as I disappear into her cavity. As I swap eggs the chick noisily makes its presence known:

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Condor 161, hearing the chick inside the egg, enters the nest and is interested in the noisy egg. She watches me closely as I ascend back to the top of the nest cliff. Once there, I take cover out of sight until the nest observer radios to tell me she has disappeared into the cavity. She does so after about 20 minutes of standing at the cavity entrance probably trying to determine if I plan on returning. While I am waiting I can still hear the hatching chick from time to time calling for her attention. When it is clear that I am no longer a threat she disappears into the darkness of the cavity and tends to her nest for the next three hours straight.

It will take the chick about two more days to completely hatch from the egg. Condor 161 tends to the nest for the rest of the day and through the night. The following day, her mate, condor 107, returns from a foraging trip and exchanges with condor 161. We will probably not see the chick until its 30-day checkup but the pair’s feeding behavior and continual attendance is a sure sign of a successful hatch and our second wild chick of the season.

Program Wide Support…

The Los Angeles Zoo and the Peregrine Fund helped save these wild nests from failure by supplying hatching eggs to put into wild nest sites, but any of the breeding programs (San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park and/or Oregon Zoo) would have given their support. Normally these eggs would have hatched at these centers and gone on to become condors that we could one day release. Instead these chicks will fledge as if they were wild chicks with parents that will care for them and teach them the skills needed for survival in the wild. The incredible teamwork by recovery program staff and the contributions of countless volunteers’ hours has brought us two chicks closer to another successful breeding season and another step towards recovery of this magnificent species.