Captivity awaits the last wild condors.

Captivity awaits the last wild condors

On April 15, biologists picked their way up a rugged cliff in Ventura County, Calif., to reach a cave containing the last remaining nest of a wild California condor. Gently, they retrieved its precious contents, a single egg, and airlifted it by helicopter to the San Diego Wild Animal Park 200 miles away. On June 6 the egg hatched, increasing to 27 the surviving world population of the largest flying bird in the United States. That alone makes the hatchling important. But this chick, named Nojoqui, is notable for another reason as well: It's the first surviving offspring of a mating between the only breeding pair of California condors alive.

It's also likely to be the last young condor to come from the wild for at least a decade, according to scientists at the Condor Research Center in Ventura. On the day Nojoqui hatched, its mothr was brought into captivity. Known as Adult Condor-8, she was the last female outside a zoo. And as a result of a U.S. district court judgment handed down last week in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has been given permission to trap and bring into its captive-rearing program the three california condors that remain in the wild.

With the capture of the first of these -- AC-9, Nojoqui's father -- the U.S. condor rescue project will have its first breeding pair (these birds mate for life). Although six condors were lost over the winter of 1984-85, the prospect of a captive breeding pair raises expectations that the endangered bird's plummeting population may be stablized and eventually increased. In fact, notes Jesse Grantham, a National Audubon Society ornithologist at the Condor Research Center (a joint FWS/Audubon project), within a few years very young condors may be introduced back into the wild.

Before they are, However, condor researchers want to establish an active captive-breeding program at the two California zoos now rearing the birds. Based on studies of AC-9, the researchers now know that males as young as 6 years old can breed. That holds out hope that the two existing condor pairs now in captivity will begin to mate soon.

Bill Toone, associate curator for birds at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, says that when the condor rescue program began its ambitious captive-rearing project four years ago, "we were all in absolute ignorance." But new research, he says, he yielded a wealth of new findings. Among those findings are: that lead poisoning from gunshot in the carcasses the birds feed on appears to be the leading cause of wild condor deaths; that the bird has a calm, almost "Labrador retriever" type of personality; that except for eggs and hatchlings, condors appear remarkably immune to infectionf and that in every way this vulture is more closely related to storks than to birds of prey.

One measure of the usefulness of these findings is the program's success record. Toone notes that the 13 chicks hatched and thriving at his zoo represent almost half the world's California condor population.