FIRE ESCAPE: HOW CALIFORNIAS WILDFIRES FORCED THIS BABY CONDOR TO FLY
“Our little phoenix”
By Rachel Becker@RA_Becks Feb 3, 2018, 2:00pm EST
On December 15th, as record-breaking wildfires raged through southern California’s Ventura County, wildlife biologists lost contact with California condor chick #871. The eight-month-old condor still hadn’t taken its first flight, and the fire was creeping down a ridge near the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge towards its nest.
Joseph Brandt, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s California Condor Recovery Program, started to worry. The radio transmitter attached to the chick’s wing was silent, and the solar-powered camera monitoring its nest had gone dark in November, as the days got too short to keep it running. “The chick was at the verge of fledging with the fire breathing down the canyon and approaching the nest,” Brandt says. “While many chicks in the past have survived fires, it’s always a situation where you’re never sure.”
There are only 450 California condors in the world — and only 276 of them live in the wild. These endangered scavengers are the largest birds in North America, but by 1982, there were only 23 left. That’s mostly because of people, who fragmented the condor’s habitat, strung up powerlines for the condors to run into, and poisoned the birds through poisoned bait, as well as carcasses contaminated with lead ammunition. The population is slowly recovering thanks to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s intensive breeding program — but every new chick is precious.
Chick #871 hatched in the wild in April 2017, and the California Condor Recovery Program’s team attached a tiny radio transmitter to its wing. That way, they could track the bird by hiking to a spot nearby and using a device that picks up the tag’s signal. If the bird doesn’t move for more than 12 hours, then that signal speeds up — a sign that the bird is in trouble. “We call that a mortality switch,” Brandt says.
More:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/3/16965970/california-condor-chick-devils-gate-nest-thomas-wildfire-survivor
