More success stories from the reintroduced California condors. In southern California, biologists recorded 12 nests this year — the highest number of nests across the broadest range ever documented in the area.
“This record-breaking nesting season signals continued progress in the recovery of the California condor,” said Joseph Brandt, supervisory wildlife biologist with the Service’s Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge Complex. “We are seeing more condors and more nests in more places in Southern California than ever before.”
In October, condor chick 933 was the first wild California condor chick to successfully fledge in Santa Barbara County since 1982. AC-4, the chick’s 38 year old papa was taken into captivity when the last surviving 22 condors were moved into a breeding program in the 1980s and re-released in 2015.
For the first time in more than three decades, an endangered California condor chick has successfully fledged from a cliff-side nest in Santa Barbara County. Last month, condor number 933 took its first short flight after six months being raised by its parents in the northern Santa Barbara backcountry of Los Padres National Forest.
The chick, known as condor 933, hatched in late April and was raised by a six-year-old female condor and a 38-year-old male condor, popularly known as AC-4. This new chick represents a milestone in the condor recovery program as the first second-generation wild fledgling in Southern California. The chick is also AC-4’s first offspring to successfully take flight from its nest in the wild.
AC-4 fledged from the Santa Barbara backcountry in 1980. For more than 30 years, AC-4 served a pivotal role in recovering California condors from near extinction. He was among 22 California condors – the last remaining on Earth – captured by biologists in the 1980s to create a captive breeding program. AC-4 was returned to the wild in 2015. While in captivity, he sired 30 chicks that were later released into the wild as part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-led California Condor Recovery Program. [...]
Biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Santa Barbara Zoo will continue to monitor the nest for the next month and expect to equip the chick with a tag and GPS transmitter within the next year.
The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns spinning around us.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
|
The number one killer of California condors is lead poisoning, caused by condors feeding on carcasses containing lead bullet fragments. When lead ammunition fractures inside the target animal, the fragments of the lead bullet can spread throughout the tissue of the animal that has been shot. As scavengers, condors unknowingly eat these small fragments and absorb the lead into their systems. Copper bullets, an effective lead alternative, are growing in popularity with the hunting community and minimize collateral wildlife damage as well as ingestion of lead fragments by hunters.
Another threat specific to condor chicks is “micro trash.” Micro trash are small coin-sized trash items such as, nuts, bolts, washers, copper wire, plastic, bottle caps, glass, and spent ammunition cartridges. Some condor parents collect these items and feed them to their chick which can cause serious problems with the chick’s development. While it is not completely understood why this occurs, many biologists believe that the condor parents mistake these items for pieces of bone and shell which provides a source of calcium if fed to the chick.
And let’s not forget Pasquale — whose pre-fledgling life was live-streamed with a camera inside the redwood tree nest cavity. Then, a camera focused on the outside of the nest caught Pasquale’s first flight.
SPOTLIGHT ON GREEN NEWS & VIEWS
EVERY SATURDAY AT 3 P.M. PACIFIC TIME
DON’T FORGET TO VIEW METEOR BLADE’S COLLECTION OF LINKS AND EXCERPTS FROM ENVIRONMENTALLY ORIENTED POSTS PUBLISHED ON DAILY KOS DURING THE PREVIOUS WEEK
|