The Yurok Tribe has been working on reintroducing the California condor to its historic territory in the redwood region for 14 years. On Monday, those efforts reached a milestone.
Monterey-based Ventana Wildlife Society transferred four of the endangered birds, who are between 2 and 3 years old, from San Simeon to the Northern California Condor Restoration Program’s flight pen in the Redwood National Park. The four birds are expected to be acclimated to the environment for six weeks before being released, after which they will continue to be monitored.
Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department, has been working on the restoration efforts since she was interning with the tribe as a college student and she said getting to this point feels surreal.
“It’s been a pretty big deal that the condor has not been here for over a hundred years now,” Williams-Claussen said. “And I’m very glad that that’s coming to an end.”
Not having the condor in the region created a major imbalance in the environment, Williams-Claussen said. The condor is a large vulture that can break into the large animal carcasses, such as deer and elk, that smaller turkey vultures and other scavengers cannot.
“If you’re walking our beaches, a lot of the times you’ll see a washed up California sea lion that will get huge and bloated,” Williams-Claussen said. “That’s because nobody can break into it.”
Condors will be able to break into them, she said, not only feeding themselves but also cleaning up the animals in the process and making them available to other smaller scavengers.
The loss has also had a huge cultural significance. Williams-Claussen said the elders prioritized the restoration of the condor a decade-and-half ago because of its close association with the ethos of world renewal. The condor is central in helping clean up the world and keep it in balance.
“We believe that he carries our prayers to the heavens when we’re asking for the world to be in balance because they actually fly higher than any other bird in the system,” Williams-Claussen said.
The condor was plentiful in the Yurok Tribe’s ancestral territory up until the period following the Gold Rush when people began monopolizing the big game animals the birds relied on for food. That put pressure on them to go elsewhere.
That, combined with poaching and poisoning, reduced the number of condors to 23 worldwide by 1982, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Efforts since then to breed the bird in captivity and reintroduce them into the wild have proven successful; there were about 504 condors as of 2020.
The Northern California Condor Restoration Program, which is a collaborative effort between the Yurok Tribe and Redwood National Park, will be aiming to release between four and six birds per year for the next 20 years, Williams-Claussen said.
The four birds that arrived Monday won’t be fully mature for another five or so years, but the expectation is to eventually grow the flock by both reintroduction and wild reproduction.
“As flocks grow and expand, they become more resilient,” Williams-Claussen said. “As you have more individuals, they learn how to navigate the landscape, they learn how to find the good resources and they learn how to be well-adapted to the area.”
The biggest threat to condors released in other areas in the Southwest has been lead ammunition used by hunters. Lead is very toxic to condors and kills them after they get contaminated from eating an animal that was shot with one of those bullets, Williams-Claussen said.
“So beyond all the infrastructure needs and all the management that we’re going to be doing for the birds, one of our big priorities for years now has been our hunters and stewards project,” Williams-Claussen said.
That project has been raising awareness among hunters about the issues with lead ammunition and has been asking them to transition to non-lead bullets. She said making that pitch hasn’t been difficult since the hunting community wants to preserve a natural and healthy ecosystem, too.
“We’ve had an amazing response to that program,” Williams-Claussen said.
The condors can be viewed on the Yurok Condor Cam at www.yuroktribe.org/yurok-condor-live-feed.
Sonia Waraich can be reached at 707-441-0504.
