Condor #1061 had already beaten the stiff odds.
Long one of the world’s most endangered species, there are fewer than 400 California condors in the wild of North America. And when avian flu hit the U.S. in 2023, only about 116 of the giant vultures were alive in their southwestern release territory.
Avian flu killed dozens of the reintroduced condors almost immediately. A few were tracked down, sick but still alive, and brought into an Arizona rescue center. Eight survived the illness, including #1061, while 21 died. One-fifth of the Four Corners population was wiped out in March 2023 alone, as Peregrine Fund condor specialist Tim Hauck puts it.
But 1061 did not have another life to spare. A year later, 1061 was briefly a curious condor making a rare trip over the state line into southwestern Colorado’s canyon country, an area condors populated heavily before the last Ice Age.
And she was promptly shot. A tracker found her body, fully grown at 3 years old, in March and sparked an ongoing investigation by Colorado and U.S. wildlife authorities for answers about the illegal poaching.
Colorado wildlife authorities said they do not have new information to share on the poaching investigation since putting out word they were seeking help and tips about what happened to the bird. Though the nonprofit Peregrine Fund has been asked by authorities to not talk about tracking 1061’s last days, Hauck does want to detail what California condors mean to biology.
Endangered-species deaths are crushing to people like Hauck even when it’s a typical part of the reintroduction story.
Hauck, though, does not see every condor death as a threat to the overall program, but more as an opportunity for more public education. The Peregrine Fund is the entity promoting and tracking the southwestern U.S. condor reintroduction, with each released condor embedded with devices sending signals to researchers.
At least some potential condor deaths could be avoided through the kind of public education the fund advocates, information that may not be on the minds of the everyday, city-dwelling public. Such as the dangers to carrion-eating condors of lead bullets.
Lead shotgun shells were banned from waterfowl hunting because ducks would be poisoned by eating stray pellets or lead traces they left behind. There’s no similar push for a ban on lead bullets, but bird defenders do ask hunters to use copper bullets in areas where rare carrion birds might ingest lead. (The condor diet is heaviest on downed deer and elk, eating up to 3 pounds of meat a sitting.)
“They have a bright future, this species, even though they’re facing a lot of diversity,” Hauck said. “Over the last few years, they’ve proven time and time again there’s enough food, there’s enough breeding habitat, there’s plenty of resources out there for them. It’s just that we have to solve those human-caused problems for the species to truly make those advances to get toward sustainability.”
The story of the California condor’s brush with extinction and its 40-year comeback is, like the birds themselves, charismatic, Hauck and other researchers say. There were only 22 known condors still in the wild in 1987 when wildlife officials agreed to capture them all and start a captive breeding program centered on zoos in San Diego and Los Angeles.
Once the condors started producing eggs, biologists came up with new reproduction support to speed up the process of creating enough birds to eventually begin reintroduction. Their methods included taking fertile eggs away from parents so they could raise another, and using condor-shaped hand puppets to feed the hatched chicks so they would accept food.
Breeding has proven so successful over the decades that condor groups periodically reintroduce the giant birds into new regions. The most recent was a 2022 release of eight birds on the territory of Northern California’s Yurok Tribe, in cooperation with Redwood National and State Parks officials.
Condors may have the threatening “vulture” look, but their size and their individual personalities means time spent with them “becomes very endearing,” and researchers “become very close” with the birds, Hauck said. Condors provide an important environmental role by cleaning up the carcasses of animals and stopping the potential spread of disease through consumption.
“But one of the most important things, I think, to remember is that the decline of the California condor and the causes for it to nearly go extinct were human related. They were anthropogenic causes,” Hauck said. “So I think we owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to condors, to right the wrong that we put the species in.”
While illegal or accidental shooting kills about 8% or 9% of released condors found dead, lead poisoning from ingested ammunition is responsible for half the deaths, Hauck said.
“We certainly don’t need to be adding more causes of death to their already difficult path forward for recovery.”
