Day of the Condor, Part 2
Last month in Ecuador, Laura got to see her “Most Wanted” bird of all.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
In the late 1970s, when I was a middle-school and then junior-high teacher in Madison, I brought my classes to the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum two or three times a year, and spent a lot of time with the curator, Frank Iwen. Once when I was visiting with him, one of my ornithological heroes, Stan Temple, came in with a puppet—a life-sized replica of an Andean Condor’s head. This was a prototype for a wonderful project Temple was working on to help the critically endangered California Condor via a captive breeding program. At the time, there were barely two dozen condors in existence, and a captive breeding program such as had been used to help some other endangered species could theoretically boost the numbers.
Condor pairs produce one egg every year or two. If something happens to an egg early enough in the nesting cycle, the pair will often still be capable of ovulating and insemination to produce a new egg, so the biologists working on this project hoped to maximize chick production with the few adults they had by removing a pair’s first egg to be kept in an incubator until hatching. After laying their second egg, they’d be left alone to raise that chick themselves.
The trick is, who would raise the first hatchling? Hand-reared birds learn to associate people with food and imprint on us or at least grow far too tame to survive in the wild. So to rear these incubator babies, the researchers hoped they could stay outside the nest enclosure, reaching in with their hand disguised as a proper adult condor to interact with the baby. No one knew if this would work, and producing a second egg is significantly more depleting than producing a single egg, so it seemed dangerous to try this on California Condors before doing some initial studies on a closely related but more abundant species, the Andean Condor.
Condors are found only in the Americas, and there are only the two species nowadays. The Andean Condor was described by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae—he gave it the generic name Vultur from the Latin word meaning “vulture.” It took longer for explorers to reach California—the California Condor was first described for science almost 40 years later, in 1797. At the time it was placed in Vultur with the Andean Condor, but by the time the American Ornithologists’ Union created the first edition of their Checklist in 1886, the California Condor had been placed in Pseudogryphus because of striking differences in coloration, the enormous plate atop the head of adult male Andean Condors, and behavior—both condors are scavengers, but the Andean Condor is also known to occasionally hunt live prey.
When the third edition of the AOU Checklist was released in 1910, the California Condor was placed in Gymnogyps, where it remains today. Gymnogyps is derived from the Greek gymnos (γυμνος) for naked or bare, and the Greek gyps (γυψ ) for vulture. The word condor itself comes from the Spanish cóndor, from the name native Peruvians who spoke Quechua called them (kúntur).
California Condors average a bit longer than Andean Condors when measured from the tip of the beak to the tip of the tail—4 ½ feet rather than 4 feet—but Andean Condors have a wider wingspan—a maximum of 10 ½ feet rather than 10 feet—and are significantly heavier—a maximum of 33 pounds rather than 24 pounds. Unlike other birds of prey, male condors of both species are larger than females.
Both species have such massive bodies that they don’t get buffeted by the wind as smaller vultures do, and both species can go for long periods without flapping. In The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin mentioned watching Andean Condors aloft for half an hour without once observing a flap of their wings. Their extremely steady flight makes both condors more likely to be mistaken for aircraft than for vultures or other birds, but the moment you notice those primary wing feathers jutting out like long fingers, you know you’re looking at a condor.
The smaller King Vulture, found from southern Mexico to northern Argentina, belongs to a different genus but is more closely related to the Andean Condor than to other vultures.
I fell in love with the California Condor, or at least with photos, written accounts, and Earth Day posters about it, five years before I started birding and over four decades before I finally managed to see one in 2011. For the first 25 years of my birding life, I kept my focus entirely on birds of the United States and Canada and managed to ignore the Andean Condor (except for seeing Stan Temple’s prototype puppet) until I went to Ecuador in 2006 and Peru in 2016. On neither trip did we see condors, but my Peru trip was when I learned that the song “El Cóndor Pasa,” which I’ve loved since I heard Simon and Garfunkel’s version in college, was a musical piece written in 1913 by Peruvian composer Daniel Alomía Robles, based on Peruvian folk music. The song was clearly about one of Peru’s most revered birds—the Andean, not California, Condor. Small wonder that after I saw my lifer Cuban Tody in 2016, the Andean Condor rose to the top of my “Most Wanted” list.
My hoping to see an Andean Condor was one of the main reasons I signed up for last month’s Ecuador trip. Our itinerary included an overnight at the Tambo Condor lodge which sure sounded promising. We arrived late in the day on December 14.
Across a huge chasm from our cabins, there was a large cliff face where the owner told us one condor was roosting. I searched with my binoculars and the lodge’s spotting scope but couldn’t see it at all. I took a bunch of photos from there just in case, and sure enough, when I got home and could scrutinize them on my big monitor, I saw that the condor was right there in every shot.
I can’t remember ever taking a photo of a potential lifer without actually seeing it with my own two eyes before this.
We set out on the morning of the 15th right around sunrise in sturdy 4x4s, heading to that distant condor roost. We left the vehicles where the rough, narrow road ended, and we started hiking. It was cold and windy, frost covering the beautiful alpine vegetation, and we were at over 12,000 feet in elevation. I didn’t suffer altitude sickness, but boy was that relatively short hike depleting! And the vantage point from which we hoped to see condors was on very uneven ground. Even with my trusty hiking stick, the effort to stay vertical was exhausting. Well, it was exhausting right up until the moment a condor appeared.
The bird was apparently just taking off from its nighttime roosting spot to find a sunnier place to warm up. It wasn’t about to start soaring before thermals developed, so it stayed low and the flight didn’t last long. The distance and rocky background would have made it almost impossible for me to focus with my old camera, but my trusty Canon mirrorless camera is amazingly good at picking out animals and focusing on their eyes, so even at that great distance, I got a few usable shots before it landed.
The spot where it alighted was very far away—my camera said “infinity” but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t quite that far. It didn’t settle in immediately—within a minute or two it took off again and circled a bit, but then hunkered down in a sunny spot at 7:40 and didn’t take off again until just after 9.
The bird was so far away that I’m rather amazed any of my photos turned out, but I got some usable ones.
I was in a great spot to see the bird loafing, but lost it when it took off for the day. Our group headed back for a picnic breakfast where we could look for two cool highland hummingbirds, the Ecuadorian Hillstar and Shining Sunbeam. I got a few pictures of the hillstar…
… but just barely caught a glimpse of the sunbeam. For a few minutes, it sat in a conspicuous perch less than 100 feet away, but I was totally wasted—I think this was the first time in my life that I felt too old or feeble to run after a cool bird. (Fortunately, I did get pictures of a Shining Sunbeam that afternoon at the feeding station at the lodge just before we headed on to our next destination.)
While we were eating breakfast, suddenly that same adult male condor was back, letting me take a few better flight shots.
The quality of my Andean Condor pictures isn’t nearly as good as my California Condor shots—the birds in California were much closer—but I’m thrilled with what I did get, and also noticed that even if my energy levels were too low to run after a hummingbird, I was just fine taking photo after photo of an Andean Condor.
We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon searching the highlands for other mountaintop species, but did not have another condor sighting. That’s okay. As a Buddhist proverb and Mary Poppins both say, “Enough is as good as a feast.” I’ll treasure my Day of the Condor for the rest of my life.
What a fantastic essay, and what excellent information!!! Thank you, Laura!
You certainly earned that sought-after condor feather in your cap!!! ;)
What a wonderful article. I admire your bravery in traveling far and wide looking for fabulous birds like the Andean Condor.
I am not as adventurous as you are, though was fortunate to get my life California Condor last year an hour’s drive south of where I live!
Take care! Susan K.