Rare California Condor Spotted in north-central New Mexico

A California Condor was spotted near Los Alamos:

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/l ... 7ba45.html

Joe

How cool is that? One of the big breeding sites is run by the Oregon zoo, but until lead bullets are banned, none will be released in the Pacific NW. The Columbia gorge was a staging area for them in Lewis and Clark's time.

It's an amazing success story. I remember the start of the program to save them from extinction, back in the mid 80s. It sounded like a great idea, but I never expected to see results in my lifetime. Instead, over the past ten years I've grown accustomed to seeing them regularly on every trip to the Central California Coast. To hear that they are spreading to other states now is miraculous.

However, at least the birds near the coast are not completely off life support yet. DDT is still present in the water where they get their food from (many countries still allow its use and eventually it ends up in the ocean) and consequently the eggs are very frail and have to be replaced with eggs from captive condors, with the eggs from the wild ones being artificially incubated.

In 1968 I was hired by the U.S. Forest Service as the condor biologist to participate in a 4-agency team to work on condor recovery which in 1972 became the first condor recovery team.  At that time it was estimated there were 53 condors remaining.  Politics and non-scientific dogma prevented early efforts at recovery but finally the scientists prevailed and the population is now growing.  I have a transparency I took of the last pair of wild condors before all were captured for captive breeding, a process the original team highly recommended but was thwarted by well-meaning, but scientifically ignorant environmentalists.

This past April I spent several days in Pinnacles Natl. Park on the California coast watching wild condors soaring over and roosting on the ridges above our camp.  They have been seen feeding on dead sea mammals along the Big Sur Coast, the location and activity of their first recorded sighting in the 1700's.  As my secular beliefs dictate, "Science is the available province of humanity."  Believe in the scientists, folks, it's them, not the politicians, who can save us.