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 Editorials | Environmental | April 2007 
Researchers Find Condor Chick in Baja
 Andrea Moss - North County Times
| | A 2-day-old California condor chick lay in a former eagle nest occupied by its parents in the Sierra San Pedro de Martir National Park. This is the first egg and first chick produced in Baja California Mexico since the Zoological Society of San Diego began releasing condors in 2002. (Mike Wallace/Zoological Society of San Diego |
In another milestone for a captive-breeding program for California condors, a San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park researcher said Monday that he has confirmed the existence of a wild condor chick high on a Baja cliff.
Dr. Mike Wallace, a field scientist with the park's Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species, said he was ecstatic to come across the baby bird unexpectedly at the end of a 45-minute climb up the Sierra San Pedro de Martir National Park cliff Sunday. The finding followed his discovery of a condor egg in an abandoned eagle's nest at the site earlier this month.
Unable to say for sure at that time whether the egg contained a healthy chick, Wallace had estimated the chances of that to be 50-50. Determined to get a clear answer during Sunday's ascent, the researcher brought along equipment that would have helped him examine the egg more closely.
"So I'm on a mission of dealing with eggs when I realized the female (condor at the site) was being much more protective with the egg than she usually was," Wallace said. "She almost knocked me off the cliff as I was going up."
The reason became clear as soon as his head cleared the top edge, he added.
"I looked around the side of the female, and I saw a little head wobbling, almost like a tennis ball," said Wallace. "It was so surprising that it was exhilarating."
The chick, which hatched sometime after April 2, is the first seen at the Baja site used to release young birds in the 15-year-old condor recovery program. Founded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the program is designed to boost the birds' numbers.
Once found throughout the Western United States and Baja California, Mexico, the condors are a type of vulture that feeds on dead fish and animals. Individual condors can weigh as much as 26 pounds and have a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, making the bird one of the world's largest.
The number of condors in California dropped to just 22 by the 1980s, though. And the last documented sighting of the bird in Mexico was in the 1930s.
Participants in the recovery program breed condors and raise the resulting chicks until they are old enough to survive on their own. The young birds are then released at various sites, including the national park in Baja, where 11 condors now fly free.
Five more housed there in acclimation cages are scheduled to be released next month.
The San Diego Zoological Society, which runs the Wild Animal Park and the San Diego Zoo, is one of the program's members. Others include the Los Angeles and Oregon zoos, the Peregrine Fund's World Center for Birds of Prey and several Mexican groups.
Wallace, who works at the animal park's Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, heads up the condor recovery team. He said Monday that he was particularly pleased with the new chick because its parents are very young - the mother is 7 years old, and the father is 6 years old - and were released in 2002.
"Most eggs fail on the first try," the scientist said. "So we were very happy to see this one make it without our (intervention)."
Condors typically spend their first 5 1/2 to six months in the nest, Wallace said. He and other members of his team plan to return to Baja periodically to check on the chick and bring bone chip fragments so the bird's parents will learn to recognize and search them out, he said.
Adult condors feed the chips to their young, and the material provides calcium and phosphorous necessary for good bone growth in the chicks, the researcher said.
He also said the team will inoculate the baby bird against the West Nile virus before it is 30 days old.
"West Nile virus is transmitted by mosquitoes," Wallace said. "I was able to kill four or five mosquitoes on my way up to the chick, so we know they are there in that dead, dry canyon. So we will definitely be doing that inoculation."
Contact staff writer Andrea Moss at (760) 739-6654 or amoss@nctimes.com. |
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