California Condor Arizona

by Stan Tekiela
© NatureSmart
August 1, 2007

This week’s column comes from the south rim of the Grand Canyon in hot and sunny northern Arizona. I am here working on photographing a long list of wildflowers, trees and some small mammals. (Oh, by the way, yes, there are trees in Arizona.) I am currently working on several new field guides for the state of Arizona and this is part of my research.

Today I have taken a break from photographing what I need to photograph and decided to photograph something I want to—the California Condor. This is what has brought me to the edge of the Grand Canyon where the vastness and beauty of this natural marvel is over-whelming.

I was here about 5 or 6 years ago shortly after the initial re-introduction of the condor to northern Arizona so I was interested in seeing how the largest bird in North America was doing.

The condor re-introduction goal was to release enough of these prehistoric birds in northern Arizona and southern Utah to establish a breeding population. This way if a disease or natural disaster occurred within the main population of condors in California there were be a healthy gene pool to draw from to repopulate.

But first a little history on the condor. During the height of the last ice age about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago the condors flew over the land in search of dead carcasses of huge pre-historic animals such as the Ground Sloth and Woolly Mammoth. Bones of the condor have been recovered in several caves in the Grand Canyon that date back to the ice age. For unknown reasons sometime after the ice age the condors disappeared from the Grand Canyon and by the time of European settlement occurred the condors were only found along the pacific coast from Canada to Baja California.

By the 1800’s the remaining population of the condor began to drop due to a variety of reasons. Not surprising most where human related. By the early 1920 condors it was estimated that less than a hundred condors were in existence. By 1980’s there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. Something needed to be done or the extinction of the largest bird species in North America was at hand. The decision was made to capture the remaining wild birds and bring them into captivity.

A very successful captive breeding program was launched and there were soon enough condors to start to release back into the wild. The first releases of the condor occurred in central California where the original birds were captured. The second population was started in late 1996 when six condors were released in Arizona. Since then, several captive bred birds have been released each year. Since all of the released birds were youngsters and condors don’t start to breed until they are 5 or 6 years of age, the first wild breeding attempt didn’t occurred until the early 2000’s. Predictably, the first wild breeding attempts were not success but in 2003 the first wild condor chick hatched. This was a huge mile stone in the recovery of this most amazing bird.

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