Ventana Wildlife Society - Condor Reintroduction Field Notes

With the exception of one very hot weekend here in Big Sur, most of this month has been cool and foggy. The June gloom has apparently descended early. Condors are less active and also less visible in foggy conditions. However, those looking for hot viewing tips should try Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. We field biologists have frequently seen condors from the park entrance looking east. They often use a line of large redwood trees growing in a line ascending to the south ridge of the canyon. The trees that are dead or have large dead parts are especially favored. Be aware that only the waterfall trail is open due to damage from the Basin Complex fire.

Female condor #375 was captured in March, tested positive for lead poisoning, and transferred to veterinary care. She was X-rayed as part of her treatment for lead poisoning, and it was discovered that she had recently been shot with a shotgun. She has recovered from both of her health problems, and was cleared to go back out in the wild. She was successfully released May 1st and has been doing well in the wild.

The other condor that had been shot, #286, was unfortunately not so lucky. He died on May 11th, after receiving the best possible care at LA Zoo. We have not heard the final autopsy results, but both lead poisoning and being shot contributed to his suffering and death. These past few months he has weighed just over half his healthy weight. The lead in his system ruined his digestive tract, causing slow starvation. The treatment he received for lead poisoning results in side-effects similar to cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. He went through 3 blood transfusions, 3 weeks of being hooked to a feeding tube, and over 2 months confined to a stainless steel cage, which is no place for a wild condor.

We have far more breeding age females in central California than males, so losing #286 was a harsh blow to our breeding effort. He was also one of the adventurous group of condors to find and feed on a beached whale. This was the first documented feeding on a whale in over 100 years. However, anyone seeing #286 in his final days would agree that death was merciful. The hunt for the person(s) responsible for shooting condors in central California continues, and the reward stands at $40,000 for helpful information.

Female condor #303, who is currently breeding in the wild, was captured this month and found to have blood lead levels more than 3 times background levels. This degree of lead poisoning is enough to make a condor ill, but is not immediately life threatening. The decision was made to treat her for poisoning but to release her rather than sending her to veterinary treatment. Her chick is still very small and would probably not survive if she was taken from the wild for more than a brief period. If her condition had been more serious however, we would have had to make a very difficult choice.

We now have 4 nests with confirmed nestlings. We recently entered all of these nests to make sure the chick was healthy and to administer West Nile virus vaccines. In approximately their second month of life, all these chicks are growing very rapidly. They just left their fuzzy and cute phase, and are now gawky, clumsy and playful. Almost overnight they lose their white down and the rounded face of the early chick phase. They are currently about the size of a large duck, with gigantic feet, dark uneven down and a prominent beak. All of a sudden they are really looking like condors!

We do have a fifth nest in the Monterey County area this year. Confirming its exact location and verifying that it contains a hatchling continues to be a challenge. Two dedicated members of our condor crew, Mike Tyner and Sayre Flannagan, put in a tremendous effort in narrowing down the location of this last unfound nest. From a remote mountain outpost, they finally observed the parents switching out. From this vantage point, Sayre was able to see which remote canyon the parents were flying into, but since the canyon mouth was narrow, there was no view inside. This newly discovered information is incredibly beneficial, but the specific nest site for this pair still eludes us. We are now reserved to the reality of the situation and that the next step in finding this nest will require the use of a helicopter. The area is simply too rugged and remote for foot exploration. Until next time…

April was another busy month and is normally a pretty safe one weather-wise. We had a violent thundering hailstorm that triggered a substantial mudslide closing highway 1, and twelve days later had a wildfire started by a downed powerline. Both of these incidents were scary, but were mostly resolved within a couple days.

Condors #286 and #375 were both hospitalized in March for lead poisoning, and found to be also shot. Condor #375 has made a dramatic recovery and will be released on the first of May. Condor #286’s lead poisoning were much more severe, and will need many more months to recover. He still weighs only 12 pounds, and should weigh 22. His skin hangs off his bones in folds, and he is very weak. He has recently gained a modest amount of weight and had his feeding tube removed. Once he was steady on his feet, he was allowed to visit an outside pen for a breath of fresh air. His prognosis is still scary, and if he does recover enough to be returned to the wild, he will find himself at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. His chosen female, #303, has picked another male and started a family with him in #286’s absence.

An adult female from the southern California flock, condor #156, is in a bit of a conundrum and appears to only want to pair up with older males that are already paired. Instead of re-evaluating her options and considering a younger male, #156 began disrupting established pairs last breeding season. She intruded into nesting areas and was physically very aggressive to pairs as well as their offspring. The USFWS biologists managing the southern flock did not want to return her to captivity, so they staged an intervention. Condor #156 was captured and transferred to Big Sur prior to this year’s breeding season. She was held in our flight pen with some of our most eligible bachelors in the hope that she would fancy one of them. We released her this month and held our breath. In the end, the experiment failed. After loitering around the Big Sur area for a couple of days, #156 hightailed it back to southern California and resumed her “Fatal Attraction” style of behavior. If she resumes her disruptive behavior again this year, USFWS biologists will be forced to capture her to protect this year’s wild condor nests in southern California, which now total 4.

The 5 nests we have located in Central California are doing well. We have successfully swapped out eggs at 4 of 5 nests. Why do we swap out eggs? Although an egg may appear healthy and normal, this does not guarantee it will successfully hatch. Most of our wild pairs are very young and we do not yet know the full extent of environmental threats to egg production. Based on eggs analyzed thus far, it appears that condors feeding on California Sea Lions are producing thin-shelled eggs, which are hampering reproduction much like what was seen with Peregrine Falcons and is still being seen today in Bald Eagles on the southern California coast. We also confirmed that the 4 foster eggs introduced into the wild nests hatched successfully. There is still one more nest in Monterey County that we have not located.

Condors #236 and #209 clearly have an active nest. They continue to display the classic “switchout” pattern, where one of them is gone for three days (presumably incubating), and then suddenly reappears just as its mate vanishes. They have chosen an area so remote and inaccessible, we found it necessary to put a GPS transmitter on the male in order to locate the nest. For those of you who value wildlands in California, rest assured that in the Ventana Wilderness there are definitely still some areas west of “Nowhere”, east of the “Void”. Wish us luck as we attempt to traverse some fairly interesting terrain!
Until next time… Jessica Koning

The heart of the rainy season is past, and we are moving into a drier and warmer time of year. Many Big Sur residents feel that we have avoided the catastrophic landslides and floods that often follow wildfires in California. Another aftereffect of the wildfires is now very apparent. The recently burned grasslands at around 1000 feet are festooned with a wildflower bloom of astonishing proportions. The dominant flowers are the so- called “fire followers”: vibrant orange California poppy and the blue-purple sky lupine. Each species is brilliantly saturated with color when viewed singly, but when poppies and lupine grow together in great numbers the contrast between their pigments defies description. We can describe these flower fields as botanical fireworks, and mean it literally and figuratively.

We are sad to announce that once more, human activities have endangered members of our condor flock. Even though hunting with bullets made with lead-free alloys is now required in this part of California, we discovered that at least two of our flock are suffering from lead poisoning. We do not believe that the lead ban has been entirely effective in eliminating the use of lead bullets, and that ingesting bullet fragments from hunter-killed mammals continues to poison condors. Both ailing condors were transported to expert veterinary care, where it was discovered that in addition to being poisoned, the condors had also been shot. It is not known yet whether the shot imbedded in these two condors is lead or steel. These injuries were inflicted in violation of several state and federal laws, and are currently being investigated by authorities. The injured condors were female #375 and male #286. #375 was less seriously injured and is expected to recover, but #286 is quite weak and will be fighting long odds. Our thanks to the veterinarians at the Avian and Exotic Clinic in Monterey and staff at the Los Angeles Zoo for their assistance and perseverance.

Thankfully, the coin has another side. This is the time of year when condor eggs are laid. A female condor will either select a cave or a huge tree cavity in which to lay her egg. She often picks a remote and pristine location. For that reason, this is also the time of year that we condor biologists deeply regret that we cannot fly. We found 3 condor nests this month in Big Sur. Locating them involved generous amounts of rigorous hiking, spectacular poison oak exposure, and lots of patience. It is likely that we will find at least one more nest next month. A female condor will lay an egg ONLY if she is mated to a male she feels will be a faithful partner and a good provider. The amount of care that a condor chick requires cannot be provided by a single parent. The pair must work together to successfully reproduce.

Thanks to assistance from USFWS and the Los Angeles Zoo, we were able to enter two of the nests to verify the eggs and to test them for fertility. These two nests contained non-viable eggs, but they will be replaced with fertile eggs laid in the zoo. This enables us to give zoo laid eggs the most natural upbringing possible and provides the Big Sur condors with parenting skills. The eggs will be examined to determine why they did not survive. On March 29th we placed a foster egg with one nesting pair and they hatched the chick successfully! Condor personnel are currently planning to place foster eggs in the other two nests in early April and hope to increase the number of chicks to three for the year.

February is always the quietest month in terms of visitors to Big Sur, but it is the most exciting month of the year to be a condor (or a condor biologist). This is the heart of the breeding season, with many courtship displays and frequent aggressive aerial chases between males. We have several new pairs to report: Confirmed bachelor condor #219 (male), has finally noticed the opposite sex, and is shopping for breeding real estate with Pinnacles female #310. Female condor #303 has recently decided that one good male is better than 4 shiftless admirers. She is setting up a breeding territory with Pinnacles male #313. Highly anticipated pair, male #209 and female # 236, who have now narrowed down their territory in the Ventana Wilderness, hopefully will lay their first successful egg this year. It is also time for our first two successful pairs, male #168 and female #208, and male #167 and female #190 to recycle and lay their second round of eggs. Both of these pairs fledged chicks in 2007, and their experience in parenting will make them even stronger parents for this breeding season.

Our annual trapping season is reaching a conclusion, with nearly all of the central California condor flock tested and released. We did encounter one high lead exposure with male condor #199, who was treated at the Avian & Exotic clinic and re-released one week later. He has been seen regularly since his release and is doing well, rejoining his mate and their chick. Much to our surprise while spending days in the blind, young condor #477 arrived at our feeding site to join the flock! While Kristy watched the birds in the trap, she noticed a bird was present that she did not recognize, Phoenix (#477)! This is the only truly wild condor chick in our flock, laid by female #231 and male #199 in 2008, and hatched without human intervention. We were able to obtain a blood sample from Phoenix and we determined he’s a male! This means we had all boy chicks for 2008.

It has been a wet February, and snow has been falling in the Santa Lucia Mountains at our release site. As the rain accumulates, the rivers swell and it becomes challenging to get up our long dirt road. As the winter is always exciting in Big Sur, we see this one being no different, and prepare ourselves for inclement weather. We have sandbags lining our office in the event of the Big Sur River rising, and have backup rations at Basecamp in case we need to stay longer than planned. We will keep you posted on the excitement…

A mild January was bestowed upon the crew this month, with several light storms enabling the Santa Lucia’s to morph into brilliant shades of green. The first signs of wild flowers have begun, and the scorched hillsides will soon be in full bloom. Fortunately, the good weather has allowed the crew to fully charge at our trapping, and we have nearly examined all 25 condors in the Big Sur flock. The results have been mostly positive, with only a few elevated lead scores. Condor #199 had the highest lead contamination and was treated and will be released in early February to rejoin his mate and their chick, Phoenix (#477). The crew is relieved to know that the flock is healthy and also wearing new tags, which will provide more thorough tracking during nesting season. We would like to send a big Thank you to Yurok Tribe biologists, Chris and Tiana, for assisting us with the trap-up effort this month.

Now that we are in full swing for nesting, many great courting observations were made this month. Condor females are picky, and they allow many suitors to display while choosing their mate. It is very humorous to watch the males in their courting dance, practicing on each other, a tree, or any other thing in their way; they enter a trance-like state and tend to bump into obstacles. The males also have to search for ideal nesting habitat, and then the pair visits the sites he has located until the female finds one she likes (house hunting!).

Although we have seen the initial bonds between some younger birds, we will expect them to tighten that bond over the next year and possibly breed in 2010. We anticipate 4-5 nests from the already established pairs, and are looking forward to finding these nests and watching them. The chicks from last year’s nests have made monumental leaps in their progress this month, as we have observed Phoenix (#477) at the condor release site!! A truly wild condor with gender unknown, Phoenix soared in to join the other condors on January 27th, and was seen feeding at a carcass and hanging out with last year’s wild chick, Ventana (#444).

The birds also got fat and happy this month on sea lion blubber. The coast provided four sea lion carcasses for the birds to feed on and we observed them lapping up the fatty goodness with delight. As the females prepare to lay their eggs in February, additional calories are welcomed into their diet, as the exertion of egg-laying can be a draining experience for these birds. We will keep you posted on the birds breeding progress next month; keep your fingers crossed…
-Sayre Flannagan, Condor Crew

In-flight species comparison chart

In-flight species comparison chart - Print a copy to take with you when looking for condors