After 100 years, condors will return to the redwoods
The majestic, endangered birds will be released through federal project
California’s scenic north coast near the Oregon border is known for having the tallest trees in the world. But soon, it may be known for another superlative: the return after more than a century of the California condor.
Under a long-awaited plan published Wednesday by the federal government, biologists will start releasing America’s largest birds in Redwood National Park, dramatically expanding the range of a species that in the 1980s was so close to extinction that only 22 birds remained.
The plan, overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, calls for releasing six condors a year over the next 20 years — 120 birds in all — starting as soon as this fall from a facility to be built in the grassy hills overlooking the massive trees at Redwood National Park in Humboldt County.
It will be the first time since 1910 that condors have flown in the rugged country north of San Francisco to the Oregon border and beyond. Scientists say the breathtaking birds, with wingspans that can stretch 9 feet and carry them 150 miles or more a day, are expected to broaden their territory not only across rural northern California, but into northern Nevada and much of Oregon.
“Once they get to know the habitat, I fully imagine these birds waking up in the morning in a redwood
near the ocean and foraging near Mount Lassen in the afternoon,” said Chris West, a biologist working on the project.
Condors once ranged from British Columbia to Mexico. But because of habitat loss, hunting and lead poisoning from eating dead deer and other animals containing hunters’ bullet fragments, the majestic birds reached a low of just 22 nationwide by the early 1980s.
In a desperate gamble to stave off extinction, federal biologists captured all the remaining wild condors in 1987 and began breeding them in the Los Angeles Zoo, San Diego Zoo and other facilities. The birds’ offspring have been gradually released back to the wild in Big Sur, near the Grand Canyon, at Pinnacles National Park in San Benito County, in Kern County and Mexico’s Baja peninsula.
The first condors in modern times to be born in the wild hatched in 2007, and today there are 504 California condors, with 329 in the wild.
The new effort at Redwood National Park will move condors to a sweeping new landscape much farther north.
But this is more than a wildlife recovery project. It also represents the latest step in a renaissance of the Yurok Tribe, whose reservation borders Redwood National Park.
For more than a decade, the tribe has helped the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service painstakingly research release sites, draft agreements with local landowners and plan the scientific details.
Once living in villages along the Klamath River and the Pacific coast, the Yurok people were decimated in the 1800s by miners, loggers and other settlers. Federal officials forcibly moved them onto the reservation in 1855, sending children to schools where missionaries punished them for speaking their native language and following their customs. At least 75% of the Yuroks died due to disease and violent attacks by the end of California’s Gold Rush.
But now the tribe of about 5,000 people, whose reservation is located 60 miles north of Eureka near the Del Norte County town of Klamath, is undergoing a renewal. Tribal officials are buying back ancestral land. They are helping lead efforts to remove dams on the Klamath River that block traditional salmon runs. Children are being taught traditional dances and the Yurok language.
Condors are important to Yurok ceremonies. Yuroks young and old see the reintroduction as a key part of the revitalization of their culture
“There’s just a lot of parallels between Condor’s near extirpation and with ours,” said Tiana WilliamsClaussen, director of the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department, during a public talk last May. “And I think there is going to be a similar parallel with Condor’s restoration and our own.”
Williams-Clausen, a tribal member who earned a degree from Harvard University in biochemical sciences, is helping finalize plans with West, who worked to reintroduce condors in Big Sur before taking a job as the tribe’s condor program manager.
They plan to break ground this summer on a release facility similar to one that the Ventana Wildlife Society runs in San Simeon. It will have a research office and pens where birds arriving from a zoo can acclimate to the wild before being released. The exact location, as with other condor release sites, is being kept secret to protect the birds.
The organizers have set up a nonprofit group, the Northern California Condor Restoration Program. A partnership between Redwood National Park and the Yurok Tribe, it is still raising money for the facilities and the costs to run the program.
To reduce the risk of conflicts with local landowners, Wednesday’s new rule from the federal government defines the new population of northern condors as a “non-essential, experimental” group. Under the Endangered Species Act, that means rules are not as strict for landowners. It is still illegal to kill or harass condors that are nesting, but accidentally harming or killing one through normal activity in the area, including timber harvesting on private lands, would not prompt fines or penalties.
Residents of the far northern California counties expect visitors to see condors there in the years to come, as they sometimes do now in Big Sur.
“We will continue the unparalleled success story of condor recovery,” said Steve Mietz, superintendent of Redwood National Park, “allowing all Americans to visit the tallest trees in the world while watching one of the largest birds in the world soar overhead.”