The California Condor

To look at a photograph of the California condor is not to gaze upon one of the prettiest birds in the world. Rather, the California condor looks as if it could enjoy a career as a bodyguard. From the neck up, the bird is mostly bald of feathers. Only a small patch of short, black feathers covers the forehead from the bird's nostrils to its eyes. With its bald head and neck, stubby hooked beak, and red eyes, the bird appears a little menacing. The California condor belongs to the New World vulture family or the family Ciconiidae. Like other vultures, the California condor is a scavenger. Unlike the turkey vulture, the California does not use smell and sight to locate dinner. The condor relies almost entirely on its keen eyesight to spot carcasses of large mammals, such as whales, seals, cattle, and deer.

The search for food can take the bird on flights of up to 150 miles in a single day. Traveling up to 55 miles an hour and up to 15,000 feet above the ground, the condor may seem to be a closer relative of a small airplane than a sparrow! With a wingspan of nine to ten feet, the California condor is the largest flight bird in North America.

Once a condor has landed at its next meal, the bird will gorge itself on food. The California condor weighs between about 17–30 pounds. At a typical feeding, the bird will ingest two to four pounds of meat. Imagine eating 10 percent or more of your total body weight at a meal! The bird does not digest all of this food at once, however. It stores some of the food in its crop. The crop is a pouch just below the throat of the bird. Some of the food eaten by the condor is stored in the crop. The food is partially digested, and the bird consumes the food over a period of time. The bird usually does not eat again for a few days. California condors kept at the San Diego Zoo are fed only four days a week to mimic the birds' natural feeding cycle.

Feeding habits of the condor have actually hurt the wild populations of this bird. The bird feeds on certain kinds of large mammals that are also hunted by humans. Condors in the wild will sometimes ingest lead fragments from bullets that may have been used to kill a deer or another large game mammal. By eating these fragments, some condors have developed lead poisoning. Hazards such as this, along with the destruction of the bird's natural habitat and poaching, have caused the bird to come close to extinction.

A captive breeding program begun in 1983 at the San Diego Zoo has brought the California condor back from the edge of extinction. When the program was started at the zoo, there were fewer than 30 condors left in the wild. The program was so successful that the zoo was able to begin releasing pairs of birds back into the wild in 1992. Some of the chicks bred in captivity were hand-raised using puppets disguised as condors to feed the chicks!

Sources:

Biology of the California Condor

http://www.fws.gov/hoppermountain/cacondor/factsheet.html

Birds: California Condor

http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-condor.html