The youngsters had been living together for months at other condor facilities in Boise, Idaho, and San Simeon, California, and they already felt at home with each other. Three young male condors, tagged A1, A2, and A3, followed. Understanding that she was in a safe place, A0 checked out the food-the carcass of a stillborn calf-then flapped onto a perch and fluffed up her feathers, a sign of avian contentment. The first thing she focused on was 746, lounging on a perch. He and his colleagues quickly learned that release programs need an adult to serve as a role model and enforce the social hierarchy that is crucial to the flock’s survival.Ī few days after 746 arrived, Condor A0, age 2, entered the flight pen. “You get the Lord of the Flies syndrome,” says Burnett. Young birds in a pen with no adult will become unruly.

“We have mentors because condors are so social,” says Joe Burnett, California Condor Recovery Program Manager at the Ventana Wildlife Society. His job is to act as the mentor for four juvenile birds who will become the founders of a reborn condor society in Yurok country. He’s on loan from the captive breeding program at the Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho. At 8 years old, Condor 746 is an adult, his naked head bright pink instead of the black found in younger birds. Once there, he hopped into the flight pen, a tall enclosure of wire mesh, furnished with log perches and a drinking pool. He rattled around in a large dog crate during the three-hour drive to the tribe’s newly built condor facility, in a remote location in Redwood National Park. The small plane that carried Condor 746 had a rough landing, and the bird was irritable.

T he first California condor to reach Yurok ancestral land in over a century arrived by plane and car in late March of 2022.

Kerbal space program free return