General Description
An enormous winged scavenger is slowly returning from the brink of extinction to its historical haunts in western North America. In 2022, this includes soaring over Pacific Northwest skies for the first time in a century.
The California condor, Gymnogyps californianus, is the largest soaring land bird on the continent, stretching 2.8 m (9.5 ft) from wing to wing, and weighing about 8.5-10 kg (18-22 lbs). A New World vulture in the family, Cathartidae, its closest relative is the Andean condor of South America (Vultur gryphus).
Up close, the brownish-red eyes of the adult condor are set in a bare, yellow to reddish-orange colored head. Its long, hooked beak is ivory-colored and mostly coated by fleshy tissue. A ruff of feathers at the base of its neck covers or exposes the entire neck for thermal regulation. Bright purplish red patches of skin on the neck and crop (upper breast) area can be highlighted during displays. Its body is mostly black, with a long triangle of white under its wing and a fainter white bar above. Males and females look similar. Juveniles are dark overall with black bills, dark, downy heads, and mottled white and dark gray under the wing, taking several years to attain adult coloration. Befitting a scavenger’s life, condor feet are flat with short claws better suited to walking (even running) than to killing or carrying prey. The legs may appear white from a coating of the bird’s own excretions (uric acid) for evaporative cooling, a process known as urohydrosis.
In flight, the California condor may be confused with eagles and vultures. The condor’s unflapping, steady soaring flight on horizontally held wings has the look of a small airplane, unlike the rocking flight of the smaller turkey vulture (Cathartes aura), whose wings tilt slightly upwards. Bald and golden eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus and Aquila chrysaetos, respectively) are also steady flyers with horizontally held wings, but they are significantly smaller (2.5 ft shorter wingspread). The dead giveaway, however, is spotting a large, numbered tag on one or both wings, which helps researchers track individual birds as part of the recovery effort.
Habitat and Distribution
Fossils show that California condors had a wide distribution in North America, including southern Canada, the eastern United States and south into Mexico, before the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions around 13,000 years ago. By the early 1900s, condors documented a century earlier in 1804-1806 by Lewis and Clark along the Columbia River and Pacific Northwest coastlines were mostly gone. By 1940, only a small population in the coastal mountains of southern California remained. Thanks to reintroduction efforts, condor populations now occur in southern and central California, Baja (Mexico), and the Grand Canyon area of northern Arizona. The Yurok Tribe in northern California is leading efforts to reintroduce condors to Yurok Ancestral Territory and the Pacific Northwest.
Condors are habitat generalists, foraging widely for carcasses from sea level to high elevation meadows. They glide for long distances in search of food over very large home ranges. One telemetry study estimated the core foraging area of a pair of breeding condors at 2500-2800 km2. Relying on keen sight to find food, they tend to forage in relatively open conditions that are made accessible by consistent air currents or thermals for soaring and gliding.
In southern California, condors nest in chaparral covered mountains, foraging in the nearby valley foothills and grasslands. Central California condors will nest in dead-top redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) as well as in cliff cavities and in rocky outcrops.
Habitat in the Pacific Northwest appears favorable for reintroduction. Suitability studies point to the abundance of mature forests (with big redwood trees), open prairies and woodlands for foraging, plentiful marine mammal carcasses along coastlines, and relatively low levels of lead, DDT and other potential contaminants in the region.
Behavior and Diet
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service