Ventana Wilderness condors have flown 150 miles south to mingle with condors released in the Sespe area. Southern California condors have also flown north to Monterey County. On 11 June 2000, nine condors settled on the roof of the Oliver observatory operated by the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA) on Chews Ridge in the Santa Lucia Mountains. The MIRA caretaker, Ivan Eberle, took these wonderful shots at MIRA during that event... the avian equivalent, I suppose, of the discovery of a passing comet [photos © 2000 Ivan Eberle, used with permission; all rights reserved]. These nine condors were from the Sespe releases in southern California; after resting a bit on the observatory they took off and flew south again; they were well south of Monterey County again within a couple hours.

All released condors have wing tags (MTY releases have yellow, blue, or orange tags so far) and each has a number on the leading edge of its wing. You can see how these wing tags look in the flight photo at the top of the page. It is difficult to determine color of the tag -- and particularly hard to determine the number -- unless you get very good views through a 'scope or you are fairly close. VWS would love to hear about any condors if you can determine tag color and number. Many of the condors also carry small antennae which are used to radio-track the movements of individual birds.

At least one of the Ventana released youngsters has learned to follow Turkey Vultures to dine on “wild” food, including at least two seal or sea lion carcasses on the Big Sur coast . The foraging on dead marine mammals is particularly poignant since the California Condor was first described to science in 1792 by George Vancouver from a condor eating a dead whale on the shores of Monterey Bay. You can keep up on the progress of the re-introduction of condors in Monterey County at the Ventana Wilderness Society's website; see especially the "Notes for the Field" page for month-to-month updates.

Searching for MTY condors: The appearance of nine condors on Chews Ridge was unexpected. For more regular spots to see condors in Monterey County, try these sites (but condors move daily, and where they are changes day to day);

• A favored roost site is at Pfeiffer-Big Sur State Park. There are pull-outs on Hwy 1 on either end of the bridge over the Big Sur River. This is just south of the entrance to the park. Walk to the center of the bridge and look back inland (east), north of the river, for the roost trees. There are several trees often used by Turkey Vultures, and these are the ones sometimes used by condors. [Beware that vultures can look "huge" when roosting close to you... if you have any doubt you are looking at a condor, you aren't]. One of the roost is right above the Big Sur Lodge. When using these roosts, condors may not leave the trees until mid-morning, and often return late in the afternoon. This tends to be a winter roost site only.
• Highway One along the entire Big Sur coast is good from the vicinity of Bixby Bridge south to Lucia. Watch for swirling groups of Turkey Vultures... sometimes condors are with them. Or sometimes condors cruise the coastline alone. When a dead seal or sea lion washes ashore, condors may feed on the carcass for weeks. One such event in July 2000 was on a beach visible from dirt pull-offs on Highway 1, just a half-mile north of the entrance to Julia Pfieffer-Burns State Park (7.1 miles south of "Nepenthe" restaurant, or a half-mile south of the paved parking lot labelled "Vista Point" that has an outline of a Gray Whale painted on the pavement).
• Andrew Molera State Park north of Big Sur (about a half-hour drive south of Carmel). While birding the park (a fantastic site for vagrants and the host of the Big Sur Ornithology Lab) keep an eye on the ridgeline to the east of Highway One. Several lucky birders have seen condors soaring along that ridgeline.

• The first California Condor known to science was described from the shores of Monterey Bay in 1792.
• Condors were once a regular part of the MTY avifauna. Nests were known from the interior and condors were regular along the coast into the 1900s. Jenkins (1906) reported seeing 8-10 roosting in tall redwoods along Villa Creek 18 July 1904 (on the southern Big Sur coast). Pemberton & Carriger (1915) saw a bird over Big Creek and report that a local rancher had seen up to 10 at a carcass as late as 1910 in what is now the Los Padres NF. There are two specimens from MTY from as late as 1918 (#California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco). A few condors were regular visitors to southeastern MTY until the late 1960s; up to 18 together had been seen in Cholame Valley (Eben McMillan quoted in Roberson 1985). Even as the numbers of birds declined, MTY remained within the expected range of wandering individuals, with 13 records from 1970-1980, all apparently of adults (Roberson 1985).
• Seventeen Condor eggs were collected in MTY from 1859 to 12 Apr 1905, and this collecting contributed to the extirpation of the local breeding population. Nest sites were apparently in the Palisades area (now in Ft. Hunter-Liggett) and along the ridge that forms the southeastern border of the county (Wilbur 1978).
• Reports of MTY condor sightings from 1970-1985 that were judged “positive” by the Condor Research Center or the by Roberson (1985) were: 25 Oct 1970 Cone Peak (P. Kinder), 28 Jan 1971 Pebble Beach (T. Robinson), 21 Mar 1971 Marble Peak (J. A. Rodgers), 22 May 1971 Cone Peak (P. Kinder), 28-29 Sep 1971 Cholame Valley (J. Edwards), early June 1973 Turkey Flat near Parkfield (B. Walton), 22 May 1974 Lower Arroyo Seco Cr. (M. Crutcher), 22 Aug 1974 Smith Mt. lookout, near Bradley (C. Halle), 31 Mar 1975 Hunter-Liggett (L. Sitton), 6 Sep 1977 Los Padres NF (T. Raley, seen from helicopter during Marble Cone fire!), 31 Mar 1979 near Devils Canyon, Los Padres wilderness (R. Phillips), 2 Aug 1980 (3 adults) se. MTY (F. Klouda) & 10 Dec 1980 Mt. Mars (J. Lopez). The Condor Research Center has on file another 9 reports between 1970-1985 evaluated "neutral" and not included here (and a 1985 report listed in Roberson 1985 should be disregarded).

• Be one of the lucky observers to have seen a condor in MTY before 1980....
• One of the original wild condors taken from the wild in the 1980s is an adult female known as "AC-8" [condor researchers have "names" for each individual condor based on their data base designations]. In April 2000, "AC-8" was released back into the wild near Mt. Pinos. Radio-tracking has shown she has begun reusing her old routes -- she could travel to MTY someday. Since she is a wild condor held temporarily in captivity (even though over 10 years!), she became "countable" under ABA rules once she regained normal behavior (that occurred within hours of her release). Condor "AC-8" has a blue wing tag on which is the white number 12. The rest of condor cohort released with blue wing tags were young birds, so right now she is the only full-adult condor with a blue wing tag. In summer 2000 she was in the Sierran foothills of Tulare County to which she commutes regularly from her winter range around the Sespe refuge.
• All local observers agree that should local nesting occur, first-generation wild condors -- born in the wild -- would “countable” on one’s list. The ABA Rules Committee has never addressed the question of reintroduced birds in native habitat directly, but I believe, based on my 15 years as a member of the ABA Rules Committee, that the approach would be very different that to non-native birds introduced into non-native habitat. For these exotic introductions, we require a minimum of 15 years of consecutive nesting plus a population expansion into all contiguous acceptable habitat plus a population explosion so large that it is unlikely the species will die out in the future (thus California parrots have never been "countable" -- populations are much too small and many species that have escaped have died out naturally because they are not perfectly adapted for our habitat, even though sometimes it takes decades for this to happen). But none of these rules apply to native birds reintroduced into native habitat, and, since we all wish to encourage these reintroductions, first-generation birds born in the wild are "countable."

Literature cited:

Jenkins, H. L. 1906. A list of birds collected between Monterey and San Simeon in the coast range of Calif. Condor 8: 122-130.

Pemberton, J. R., and H. W. Carriger. 1915. A partial list of the summer resident land birds of Monterey County. Condor 17: 189-201.

Roberson, D. 1985. Monterey Birds. Monterey Peninsula Audubon Soc., Carmel, CA.

Wilbur, S. R. 1978. The California Condor 1966-76: A Look at its Past and Future. North America Fauna 72. U. S. Fish & Wildlife Serv., Washington, D.C.

Page created 25 June 2000; updated 30 July 2000