A Record-Breaking 17 California Condor Chicks Hatched at the L.A. Zoo This Year
The successful breeding season offers more hope for the endangered species, which has come back from the brink of extinction due to captive breeding efforts
Weighing 17 to 25 pounds and possessing a wingspan of up to 9.5 feet, California condors are the largest flying birds in North America. But in 1982, only 22 individuals were left in the world.
Flash forward to the present, and the Los Angeles Zoo has just reported the hatching of its 17th chick of the year, thanks to a new breeding technique. The zoo announced the happy news, which breaks its 1997 record of 15 condor chicks in one breeding season, in a statement on Friday.
“This is a historic moment for the California Condor Recovery Program and the Los Angeles Zoo’s animal care team,” Rose Legato, curator of birds at the L.A. Zoo, says in the statement. “Our condor team has raised the bar once again in the collaborative effort to save America’s largest flying bird from extinction. What we are seeing now are the benefits of new breeding and rearing techniques developed and implemented by our team.”
The L.A. Zoo, along with other California Condor Recovery Program (CCRP) facilities in the United States and Mexico, breeds endangered California condors for release into the wild. The breeding birds in L.A. reside in structures the staff calls “condor-miniums,” as zoo spokesperson Carl Myers tells the Los Angeles Times’ Corinne Purtill.
Once a pair successfully fertilizes an egg, the animal caretakers put it in an incubator. Then, right before eggs are due to hatch, they place each egg with an adoptive condor parent. In their natural habitats, California condors usually raise one chick at a time—so for a long time, if there were more eggs than condor parents available, the leftover chicks would be raised by humans.
The human surrogate parents tried their best to give the hatchlings a natural experience—even using bird puppets and stuffed animals to prevent them from associating people with food. But in the words of the Verge’s Justine Calma, “condor moms still make much better parents than humans trying to step in.” Young condors raised by condors have a higher chance of survival in the wild. So in 2017, the L.A. Zoo animal care staff tried giving two eggs to a single adoptive condor parent. The technique, which had never been attempted by any other zoo or CCRP partner at that point, was successful.
“The result is more condor chicks in the program and ultimately more condors in the wild,” Legato adds in the statement.
This year, the zoo team was inspired to try three chicks per single condor. The birds were receptive to this, too, and ultimately the condor surrogate parents raised six chicks in triple broods, eight chicks in double broods and three chicks in single broods. All hatchlings will remain at the zoo for about a year and a half before being evaluated for release into the wild.
“Condors are social animals, and we are learning more every year about their social dynamics. So, I’m not surprised that these chick-rearing techniques are paying off,” Jonathan C. Hall, a wildlife ecologist at Eastern Michigan University, tells the Los Angeles Times. “I would expect chicks raised this way to do well in the wild.”
California condors used to be a common species across North America, but their numbers began to decline with the arrival of settlers in the 19th century, who killed them and destroyed their nests. In 1967, the federal government declared the California condor an endangered species, but the giant birds’ numbers continued to dwindle because of pesticides like DDT, microtrash, habitat loss and—most crucially—lead poisoning from bullet fragments left in animal carcasses that they scavenge.
“California condors are part of nature’s cleanup crew,” Ashleigh Blackford, the California Condor Recovery Program coordinator, tells the Guardian’s Coral Murphy Marcos. “Although it’s not an appealing job, it’s an essential job.” But due to environmental pollutants, this role put the birds at risk.
Then, in 1979, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the CCRP. The program is now a multi-entity mission that collaborates with the L.A. Zoo as well as private and public agencies, NGOs and Indigenous tribes. Recovery efforts have been highly successful—as of the end of 2023, there are 561 living California condors, of which 344 are in the wild.
The trouble isn’t over yet, however, as California condors are now facing the risk of avian influenza. In response to this threat, CCRP partners have been vaccinating the birds before releasing them.
