Grand Canyon National Park Centennial Briefings: California Condor Management

Centennial Briefings Purpose
When Congress established the National Park Service in 1916, Congress gave the agency a specific purpose: “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

During the summer of Grand Canyon National Park’s 2019 centennial, scientists and resource managers briefed fellow staff and the public about how they are helping to enable future generations to enjoy what is special about Grand Canyon.

This article is from a transcript of a June 5, 2019 briefing about California condor management in Grand Canyon. Its conversational quality reflects the passion and personalities of the people behind the park.

California Condor Management Presenter
Cody Lane spent the centennial summer as a Geoscientist in the Park (GIP). The GIP program is a partnership between the National Park Service, Geological Society of America, Stewards Individual Placement Program, and AmeriCorps. It helps address the current needs and mission of our national parks while providing valuable work experience to participants in geoscience and other natural resource science fields.

Of his interest in wildlife and experience at Grand Canyon, Cody Lane said:

My career in natural resource management and ecological research arose from the obsession with wild animals that I have had since I was a toddler. As my awareness of environmental degradation and declining biodiversity developed through high school and college, I knew that I wanted to pursue work that allowed me to help conserve endangered species and the habitats they rely on.

After finishing college and working temporary wildlife research technician positions for a few years, I came across the GIP program at Grand Canyon through an online job board and was fortunately selected for the position. The condor work proved to be the largest component of my time at Grand Canyon and afforded me the opportunity to explore many of the canyon’s more remote areas. My fondest memory occurred during my first fall when I confirmed the presence of a nestling condor in the beautiful Tapeats Creek area. It was truly incredible to provide this key piece of information to the broader condor conservation program.

A young California condor near Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park.

NPS / Mark Lellouch

It Takes a Lot of Effort to Raise a Condor Chick!

The Male’s Trying His Best
November to January they have their courtship and their pair formation. Condors usually mate for life. The male will do this crazy dance and do this head bob thing. There are some really funny videos on the internet of the female just peaceing out after the male’s done his whole dancing show - just so uninterested, but the male’s trying his best. After they’ve formed a pair, they’ll start looking for nest caves.

The Parents Will Take Turns Incubating
They’ll usually lay their egg somewhere in the early winter, January or February. The parents will take turns incubating for about two months. They’ll just sit in that cave for multiple days on end while the other member of that pair is feeding, and then they’ll do a swap. If the first egg fails, they will sometimes reclutch and lay another egg.

That Juvenile Will Stick Around
That chick will be there in the cave for five or six months before it finally leaves and fledges and gets into the big, bad world. That juvenile will stick around with the parents for about a year, until eventually the parents get sick of the chick and stop feeding it.

They’re Just a Long-Lived Bird
And then they won’t reach breeding age for another six to eight years after that. They’ve been releasing condors now for 25 years, and part of the reason growth has been slower is because they’re just a long-lived bird. Being such a large bird, they have a really slow reproductive rate, so they only breed once every other year. We have birds that are 12 years old who don’t breed. They just don’t seem to be in any rush to. It takes a lot of effort to raise a condor chick!

It'll Be Interesting To See

Our oldest bird is 24 years old in the wild here. That bird doesn’t breed. It used to, but it had multiple mates die and hasn’t been mated in a long time. It’ll be interesting to see over the next 20 years how late these birds will breed. Will they breed in their 40s? It’s hard to say. They could be like albatrosses, who will breed in their 60s. Or they might not be. We don’t know. Prior to the recovery efforts, we didn’t know how old the birds were that were in the wild. We do know that Andean condors can live over 60 years. The record is 52 years - that is a captive bird in the Los Angeles zoo.

Condors Were an Inadvertent Cost

They Went Endangered
They went endangered because of shooting, both intentional and accidental. In the early 1900s it was really popular to put bird feathers on women’s hats, and it led to a decline in multiple species. Egg collecting. Indirect poisoning from the widespread removal of predators from the West for ranching purposes. DDT, the famous pesticide that Rachel Carson wrote about in Silent Spring. Food scarcity. At the same time as indirect poisoning and DDT contamination, there was widespread market hunting of large game species, and those are the food sources for condors. Loss of habitat. Human disturbance to nesting sites, and collisions with power lines and motor vehicles. By about 1950, the only place that you could find California condors were in the central coast of California. Condors continued to decline to only about 22 in 1982. Condors were an inadvertent cost of our actions in the early 1900s. We weren’t trying to eliminate them, but they suffered anyway.

There Was a Lot of Debate
There was a lot of debate over whether or not to bring them into captivity or just let them go extinct. They decided to start bringing them into captivity, and for the next five years they captured all the free-flying condors left in the world. In 1982, at the same time, they started captive breeding. In 1992 they reintroduced them in California, and in 1996 they released them in northern Arizona.

We’ve Made a Lot of Progress

Over 300 Condors in the Wild Now
We have 188 in California, we have 92 in northern Arizona and southern Utah, and 36 in Baja California. They are adding a fourth population mostly spearheaded by the Yurok Tribe, but the release site is going to be located at Redwood National Park. We’ve made a lot of progress – over 300 condors in the wild now, about 180 in captivity.

An adult California condor spread its wings along the Tonto Trail in Grand Canyon National Park.

NPS / Michael Quinn

We Still Have Problems
But we still have problems with condors. Collisions, mostly with power lines and motor vehicles. Micro trash - those little bits of granola wrappers, zip ties, coins. Condors and a lot of other birds will pick those up and eat those. The biggest problem we’ve had is lead poisoning. Most of it is coming from the fragments of lead bullets. Those fragments get everywhere. Most of the time when you go out hunting, the gut pile is left out there. The condors eventually find those gut piles. Because condors have a very strong stomach acid, they process those lead fragments quickly and they have a really acute exposure to lead. In Arizona and Utah, the state offers the opportunity for hunters to exchange their lead bullets for copper bullets for no expense and rewards from bringing in your gut pile if you do use lead ammunition. If we removed the lead poisoning issue, I think we would be well on our way to delisting them as an endangered species, and for them to be self sustaining.

Cody Lane used telemetry to track condors in Deer Creek during the summer of 2019.

GIP/Kirsten Fuller

The Whole Point
Our breeding females in the population, as many as we can, have GPS tags on their wings. That lets us find their nest caves really accurately by seeing where they spend the most time. The condors have VHF tags, and we can track them live with this antenna. Using a simple spotting scope to just look to see where the condors are hanging out. The whole point of everything we do here is not only to see which condors are using the park, but to find nests.

You Can See That Bird
In 2018, we had three wild chicks fledged in this population, ten in California, and two in Baja. We released 29 birds across the three populations. We had 20 deaths in the wild – one third of those are from lead poisoning, another third are pending lab results. The three that are wild fledged, two came from Grand Canyon National Park and one came from Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. One was off the Battleship formation last year. You can see that bird at El Tovar or Plateau Point pretty frequently now. Thunder River area in the western part of the park. And one bird just upstream from the Navajo Bridge.

These Numbers Are Really Rough
At this point in the year, it’s hard to tell if condors are still breeding or just kind of visiting nest caves for the heck of it, or maybe they’ve failed and they’re still hanging around… It’s really hard to tell, so these numbers are really rough - four in Grand Canyon, one in Zion, and four in the Vermillion Cliffs area. Stay tuned this fall for which nests will fledge.

You can catch up with the Southwestern California Condor population by searching the internet for Condor Gossip Sheet.  This one shows all the buzz from June 24, 2020. Image directs to most updated version.

NPS

You Can Report Condor Sightings

We’re Always Happy to Hear
eBird is a user-powered citizen-science program started by Cornell. It’s used all over the world for reporting bird sightings. You can report condor sightings there. You can do it at iNaturalist. Or you just search GRCA condor updates on whatever search engine you’re using. There will be a link to Grand Canyon biologists, and we’re always happy to hear about condor reports, especially if you have photos.

Everyone Is Welcome
If you’re still around here in the fall, I encourage you all to go to the public release at the Vermillion Cliffs, a public event hosted by the Peregrine Fund. They have a flight pen, and the birds will live at that flight pen for a few months and adjust to being in Arizona and away from Boise or Portland or LA or wherever they came from. Then they’ll put them in the release pen, and then they’ll release them.

Ranger Ron Brown talked with young condor enthusiasts at the 2015 California condor release at Vermilion Cliffs.

NPS / Kristen Luetkemeier