Zion’s rare condors fuss over nest. Rangers hope it’s the park’s first healthy chick

Last month, biologists at Zion National Park in Utah captured video of a pair of endangered California condors in their nest with a newly-laid egg. Rangers said at the time that the park had never successfully produced a baby condor.

But now rangers suspect that egg has hatched, meaning there’s likely a new baby condor at Zion. And if it survives, it would be the park’s first successful hatchling: Chicks have been born at the park before, rangers said last month, but have died before they were old enough to fly.

“Recent behavior changes from these condors have given park biologists reason to believe the egg has hatched,” Zion rangers wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday, estimating the chick hatched about three weeks ago.

That’s big news, and not just for the national park itself: There were only 290 California condors in the wild as of 2017, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And even that number was an improvement from the 1980s, when lead poisoning, pollution and other human activities drove the huge birds to the brink of extinction, with a worldwide population of just 27 in 1987, according to California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Zion shared video along with the update this week showing the parent condors (female condor 409 and male condor 523) as they swapped nesting duty. Rangers explained that “while incubating their egg the condors would switch nest-sitting duties every 3 to 4 days but now they are switching almost every day.”

Rangers said the video captures the male condor flying along the canyon wall to land at the their shared nest, while the female condor flies around to come in next to him “as they strengthen and renew their social bonds during a nest exchange.”

Roughly a month after the baby’s birth, it will be able to regulate its own body temperature well enough that its mother and father won’t need to help warm it, according to park rangers.

“This is also about the time the chick will start to become more mobile at the nest site and give biologists a chance for their first visual,” rangers said.

In the earlier Facebook post announcing the nest discovery, rangers said it was found on Minotaur Tower on a cliff face north of Angels Landing, one of Zion’s more popular attractions. Video the park shared showed the birds swapping places, so each could take a turn sitting on their egg.

“We estimate that the egg was laid in mid-March, which makes the hatch date around early May if all goes well,” rangers said at the time, adding that the mother and father condor are often seen at the park. “They have been together for two years but have not produced a chick together yet.”

To rescue the population from extinction decades ago, all the remaining birds were captured and bred in captivity for years, and now there are 463 California condors, with 173 of them in captivity, California’s 2017 population status report found.

Lead poisoning killed the female Zion condor’s old mate in June 2016 during nesting season, and the chick they had conceived vanished in September of that year, according to park rangers. That earlier coupling also hatched a chick in 2014, but the bird died before fledgling.

California condors are among the largest flying birds in existence, with wingspans of more than nine feet — and their endangered South American relative, the Andean condor, can grow even larger, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

With those colossal wings, the condor can glide in the air for hours on end as it searches for food, covering extreme distances at up to 55 miles an hour without flapping its wings, the state website on the birds said. Condors feed only on dead animals they discover, such as deer and cattle, which makes them susceptible to lead poisoning from ammunition.

Today, California condors are only found in the wild in California, Arizona, Utah and Mexico’s Baja California, according to the federal population count of the birds.

But before they faced the threat of extinction, the birds could be found across the continent — including in Florida, New York and Texas, California’s wildlife department said.

According to Zion park rangers, condors are “attracted to human activity.”

“If a bird is perched, do not approach it or offer food,” the park recommends. “If a condor is within reach of people, please report the situation — including the bird’s tag number — to park staff.”

Some material in this story appeared in an earlier article by the author

This story was originally published May 30, 2019 at 1:31 PM with the headline "Zion’s rare condors fuss over nest. Rangers hope it’s the park’s first healthy chick."