Development: Condors facing new threats
When California condors flaunt their jaw-dropping wingspan and glide across the sky, it's hard to mistake them for any other bird.
Few of us in the Bay Area are lucky enough to have witnessed such a sight.
But last autumn, a flock of California condors graced the Contra Costa skies for the first time in over 100 years. It was also the first recorded condor sighting west of Mount Diablo's peaks. Unfortunately, this spectacular appearance is marred by encroaching development across the Bay Area that would set back decades of recovery.
Extinction was imminent for the California condor in 1980, when just 22 majestic birds existed. A captive breeding and reintroduction program rescued them from the edge. This rare sighting of six condors more than 100 miles from their nesting site shows what's possible if there's a willingness to combat the extinction crisis. Extinction, after all, is a choice, not an inevitability.
But confronting biodiversity loss and the extinction crisis is hard work. Once condors born in captivity are successfully introduced, their fight for survival has just begun. They face myriad threats including lead poisoning, collision with power lines and encroaching development.
Condors have an incredibly wide range, traveling hundreds of miles in a single day in search of prey. They need foraging habitat to find food and rocky areas to nest but their home turf is constantly under threat.
Outside Gilroy, about 80 miles south of Mount Diablo, officials are considering a proposal to develop a sand and gravel mining operation that would destroy more than 400 acres of essential condor foraging habitat as well as prime habitat for California redlegged frogs, golden eagles, American badgers and mountain lions.
Santa Clara County is expected to release a final report later this year that will outline the environmental harms of this project. It is our hope that the real dangers are revealed and county leaders deny this destructive operation.
Digging up these lands would also decimate a landscape with invaluable cultural and spiritual significance.
The property lies within Juristac, the most sacred ancestral lands of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.
The tribe is very invested in the condor's comeback, leading ceremonies to release the condors and working with the National Park Service on their recovery. Condors are a culturally significant species, serving as constant messengers between tribal members and their deceased relatives who have passed to the other side.
It is shortsighted to try to recover a species only to turn around to destroy their habitat. Juristac is not only a biodiversity hotspot but an important wildlife connectivity area that links the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Diablo and Gabilan mountain ranges.
Developing a quarry, a processing plant and all the associated roads and infrastructure here would severely degrade one of the last remaining wildlife connectivity areas in the region. This area is crucial for the survival of not just condors but the isolated puma population, which is reaching dangerous levels of inbreeding.
Other threats to Amah Mutsun ancestral lands and this critical connectivity area abound in nearby San Benito County, where the county is pushing to build commercial development projects like Strada Verde, Betabel, and the San Benito Ag Center. The cumulative impacts of these projects would be devastating to the tribe and local wildlife.
Overdevelopment has led to habitat fragmentation and an extinction crisis that goes far beyond condors. We have to avoid the mistakes that brought us to this extinction crisis in the first place. Otherwise, poorly planned development will lead to a world where the sight of condors soaring overhead is a mere fantasy.