Recovery

After decades of careless poisoning and shooting, only a handful of these birds remained in the wild in the mid-1980s. In 1988, the first successful breeding among condors in the program occurred at the San Diego Zoo, and four years later two were reintroduced into the wild.

In 2004, the first condor chick on record to be hatched in Oregon was hatched at the Oregon Zoo's breeding facility: Kun-Wak-Shun

The program augments its rearing efforts with training that helps young condors adapt to a modern landscape "Aversion training" teaches the highly curious birds to choose natural branches for perching instead of telephone poles near dangerous power lines.

Condors depend on their intelligence for survival and require a tremendous amount of parental investment in the wild. This is one of the reasons why they have a low productivity rate.

Normally condors lay only a single egg every other year, but in captivity this process can be sped up. If the egg is removed from the nest to an incubator for hatching, female condors will usually lay a second egg, and sometimes later a third. This procedure is known as "double-" or "triple-clutching," and has dramatically increased the numbers of condors since captive breeding began. Since that time, the condor population has grown to about 300.

Through captive breeding and rearing, the Oregon Zoo, the San Diego Zoo, Los Angeles Zoo, and The Peregrine Fund are helping to bring back the California condor. Coordination and implementation of the recovery program and oversight of all program partners is done by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Condor Recovery Team.

Recovery of condors to Oregon is a distant goal of the Oregon Zoo. Due to the network of relationships that condors depended on for survival in the Northwest, any future efforts to return condors to the region will require us to think in terms of the restoration of whole ecosystems, including healthy salmon runs, viable marine mammal populations, and even the vitality of our own cultures and ability to coexist with and regenerate natural systems. From this perspective condors are both a biological and a cultural indicator species that provide us valuable information about the diverse communities that sustain them, including our own creative capacity to give back to and support ecosystem services across the land.

Sunning over the Pacific Ocean — Big Sur
Photo ©: D. Moen