Status of the California Condor and Efforts to Achieve its Recovery

Walters, Jeffrey; Derrickson, Scott; Fry, D. Michael; Haig, Susan; Marzluff, John; Wunderle, Joseph

The California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) has long been symbolic of avian conservation in the United States. Its large size, inquisitiveness and association with remote places make it highly charismatic, and its decline to the brink of extinction has aroused a continuing public interest in its plight. By 1982 only 22 condors remained, and the last wild bird was trapped and brought into captivity in 1987, rendering the species extinct in the wild (Snyder and Snyder 2000). At that time, some questioned whether viable populations could ever exist again in the natural environment, and whether limited conservation funds should be expended on what they viewed as a hopeless cause (Pitelka 1981). Nevertheless, since that low point a captive breeding and release program has increased the total population by an order of magnitude, and condors fly free again (Figure 1) in California, Arizona, Utah and Baja California, Mexico. Today, in the summer of 2008, there are more than 300 condors, more than 150 of which are in the wild. The wild birds face severe challenges, however, and survive only through constant human assistance and intervention. The intensive management required to maintain the birds in nature, as well as the ongoing monitoring and captive breeding programs, are tremendously expensive and become more so as the population grows. Thus the program has reached a crossroads, caught between the financial and logistical pressures required to maintain an increasing number of condors in the wild and the environmental problems that preclude establishment of naturally sustainable, free-ranging populations. Recognizing this dilemma, in November 2006 Audubon California requested that the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) convene an independent panel to evaluate the California Condor recovery program. The Panel’s charge is to evaluate and synthesize accumulated knowledge and experience in order to reassess the program’s fundamental goals and recommend needed changes (see Appendix 1 for details). Thus it is hoped that this report will provide a vision of the program for the next 10-25 years, much as Ricklefs et al. (1978) did for the past 25 years. To fulfill this charge we reviewed the condor recovery program from September 2007 through July 2008 by visiting captive breeding facilities in Los Angeles, San Diego, Boise and Portland, visiting release sites in southern California, central California and Arizona, reading the published literature, conducting interviews with program participants in person during site visits and via telephone conference calls, and soliciting written comments from those with whom we were unable to speak personally (Appendix 2). In this document we report our findings.