A Look at Conservation - The California Condor

Conservation can vary greatly in terms of social, economic, political, and cultural challenges. As an American-based group, we at CAFE Vulture want to discuss the California Condor’s conservation efforts as our textbook example for how conservation can look.

During the late 20th century, California Condor populations had reached critical lows ; the result of poaching, habitat destruction, insecticides and chemicals like DDT, and especially lead poisoning from bullets in carrion. Although no reliable estimate can be found for pre-20th century population estimates, the National Park Service notes that “by the late 1800s, naturalists were already making note of the California condors’ declining numbers”. By 1982, the total population of condors had dropped to 22 individuals, and they were declared extinct in the wild, meaning all members were held in captivity. Thus began the government-funded California Condor Recovery Plan.

There come many challenges with reintroducing any animal deemed extinct in the wild. For starters, if you have too small of a population to breed more individuals, genetic diversity becomes scarce, and inbreeding often results in a population that can’t survive for more than a couple of generations. Even if there are enough individuals, survival skills are often passed down generationally, so animals bred and raised under human care are often unprepared for life in the wild, and die.

In the case of the California Condor, the 22 individuals were deemed a large enough population for sufficient genetic diversity, and breeding of the vultures slowly, but surely, began. Zoos, not limited to those in California, spearheaded these efforts by raising newborns using realistic hand puppets, such that the chicks would not imprint on humans. Some also began treatment for vultures that had become ill due to the common lead poisoning problem.

By the 90’s, the population had risen to about 100 individual as efforts towards reintroduction began in 1988. During reintroduction and up to today, biologists and ornithologists keep close track of populations, and even on the well-being of individual condors. Some condors can even be found with a numbered tag, which biologists can use to determine the range of the general condor population. Thanks to the diligent observation and reintroduction efforts, California Condor populations have most recently been denoted to have risen to over 500 individuals in 2020.

That being said, California Condors are still considered critically endangered, and reintroduction continues to face challenges. Poaching, habitat destruction, DDT, and lead poisoning continue to be problems, and new issues include unanticipated deaths from contact with Golden Eagles and collisions with power lines. Efforts actively continue to address these issues, old and new, as laws have been passed to curb the use of lead ammunition, and some condors have even been trained to avoid power lines - something which has seen a decrease in condor deaths due to power line collisions.

The reintroduction of the California Condor to parts of California, Arizona, and even Mexico, is certainly cause for celebration. It serves as a reminder that even at the brink of extinction, conservation efforts can have significant impacts, as well as a source for hope for currently threatened vulture populations. If California Condors could be saved from extinction at the final hour, what’s to say we can’t save any vulture, no matter their state of endangerment?