CALIFORNIA CONDOR WINGSPAN SKIN

Or, if you like a really close look, our very own Santa Barbara Zoo has a few condors on display.Īll condors now sport numbered wing tags, which aid in tracking the birds. Reliable places to see condors are the Grand Canyon, Big Sur, and Pinnacles National Park. There are now more than 500 condors in existence, and more than 300 of those are now free-flying. In 1980, a major recovery plan went into effect, with captive breeding initiated at several zoos, and in 1992, two birds were released back into the wild in Ventura County, and since then, there have been steady reintroductions in other parts of the west. Sign up for Indy Today to receive fresh news from, in your inbox, every morning. A condor takes anywhere from six to eight years to reach maturity, but if they can avoid man-made dangers, they can live up to 60 years. It takes a year for a young condor to be fully independent of its parents, and because of this long caring period, egg-laying does not occur every year.

They only lay one egg per nesting attempt, usually in a cave on a cliff face, but sometimes in tree stumps of redwoods. Because of this, lead bullets were outlawed for hunting in the state in 2013.Ĭompounding these problems was the condors’ slow rate of reproduction. Of all deceased condors tested in the last two decades, half have died from lead poisoning.

All condors are carrion-eaters - part of nature’s cleanup crew. Some of these birds ingested lead fragments from bullets left in the carcasses of deer and other animals. Not only were humans encroaching upon the birds’ habitat, but many birds died from poisoning, often from strychnine-laced carcasses used to control coyotes. By the late 1900s, the remaining birds were restricted to the mountains of southern California, but still the birds declined.

Numbers soon plummeted as the birds were shot and had their eggs stolen. When the first European settlers surveyed western lands, condors were known from British Columbia to Baja California. The Chumash must have revered the condor, as there are cave paintings that clearly depict the species. At this time, only 27 California condors remained in the world, all in captivity. The year was 1986, the place was the arid mountains to the east of Cuyama within a few months of our sighting, in an effort to save the species, these last three free-flying condors were captured. This was my third time looking for these birds, and the first I’d seen anything other than dots in the distance.

CALIFORNIA CONDOR WINGSPAN SKIN

The skin on the adults’ head is orange, and there is a dramatic pure-white triangle on the underside of the wing. The sheer bulk of the birds can give the impression of a small plane, and it is said that they can soar for a hundred miles without flapping. They are the biggest North American bird with a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, dwarfing golden eagles, which often share the same habitat. What a sight! There really is nothing quite like seeing a condor on the wing. Finally, Chris came around and freed me from my prison, and fortunately, the three adult condors were still flying in wide circles overhead. The seconds I struggled with the belt stretched on and on, and the air immediately above my head was blue with invective. I couldn’t unfasten the passenger seat belt in Chris’s aged VW bus, and he was outside ecstatically looking up, giving a running commentary as he watched the last three free-flying California condors in the world.

California condor wingspan