Critically Endangered, but Not Shy: Camera Spots Bunch of Condors Just Hanging Out

Updated 2 p.m. Thursday

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p in the higher reaches of the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, a cool piece of modern technology is giving a close-up look at an ancient marvel of California’s skies.

On Tuesday, a wildfire camera on a mountaintop 30 miles northeast of downtown Bakersfield captured a group of as many as 10 California condors roosting at a communications tower there.

One bird in particular, a 7-year-old female designated alternately as Condor 811 or “Lulutti,” put on a bit of a show. She stared straight into the camera at one point to show off her naked, wrinkled, pinkish-red head. Later, she displayed her impressive wingspan and jet-black plumage.

Another member of the flock, a 14-year-old male prosaically named Condor 509, eyeballed the camera as the sun rose over the Sierra Wednesday morning.

Then he and others perching on steel towers festooned with cell transponders and other electronics glided off, presumably to look for a meal. Which, if you’re not familiar with condors’ gastronomic programming, consisted of dead meat. Later Wednesday, at least 14 of the birds had returned to the towers.

(How do we know anything about these wild birds’ biographies? Each of them has a color-coded, numbered tag that allows the casual web condor watcher — or anyone lucky enough to spot Gymnogyps californianus on the wing — to confirm a bird’s identity, life history and family ties on an online database.)

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency managing the long-running California Condor Recovery Program, said the site is a known roosting spot for the birds. According to agency spokesperson Joanna Gilkeson, a condor hangout like the one on Blue Mountain “is not unusual. California condors are highly social birds and are known to congregate in this way.”

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he camera atop Kern County’s Blue Mountain, elevation 4,813 feet, is part of a network managed and put online by a UC San Diego project called ALERTCalifornia. The instrument shows the birds with startling clarity. But it barely hints at what a wonder those winged creatures represent: an iconic raptor, one of the biggest birds anywhere on Earth, brought back from the edge of extinction.

The bird was once found from northwestern Mexico to British Columbia and across the country as far east as Florida. Like many other species, it did not mix well with the civilization that colonized and remade the continent. Hunting, lead poisoning and habitat destruction took a seemingly irreversible toll.

Then, as the bird’s range shrank to a patch of wilderness in southern Central California, federal wildlife officials in 1967 declared it an endangered species. But the population continued to shrink, and by the early 1980s just over a dozen wild California condors remained. The Fish and Wildlife Service moved to take the few remaining wild birds into captivity — with the last captured in April 1987.

Working with the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos, the agency launched an effort to breed condors with the aim of restoring them to the wild. In 1992, the program released a pair of condors back into their native range in Ventura County.

So where are we today?

At the end of 2022, the Fish and Wildlife Service put the total population of California condors — both free-flying and in captivity — at 561. The condors roosting on Kern County’s Blue Mountain this week — perhaps as many as 10 at a time — are among the 347 free-flying birds in the wild today.

Those include both captive-bred condors, like 811/Lulutti, and birds bred and reared entirely in the wild, like Condor 509. Free-flying flocks have been established in Southern and Central California, Arizona, Utah and northwestern Mexico. The newest wild releases are in Northern California, a restoration effort involving the Yurok Tribe.

Despite the overall success of the program to date, it’s far too early to assume the California condor has been saved. In late 2020, the Fish and Wildlife Service reported that 309 free-flying condors had died since releases began in 1992 (PDF).

The cause of death is listed for 213 of those birds, and it’s a catalog of all the many ways our world remains hostile to fragile life: 11 condors were shot, 19 more ran afoul of power lines, 9 died in a Monterey County wildfire. More than half, 107, died of lead poisoning, generally assumed to be the result of eating dead game contaminated by lead bullets.

Climate change will also inevitably present challenging odds for condors’ long-term survival. And that’s not all: Federal officials are currently racing to test a vaccine against an unusually deadly strain of avian influenza that has spread through both wild and domestic flocks of many species of birds in California over the past year or so. The virus has already killed more than a dozen California condors.

So the condor’s future? Yes, uncertain.

Its present? We’re still checking on the view from Blue Mountain, and we’re still amazed at the enormous feathered apparitions that’ve shown up on camera.