Congrats to the team at the Los Angeles Zoo on the hatching of TEN CALIFORNIA CONDORS!
There were only 22 California Condors on Earth when the California Condor Recovery Program started 40 years ago.
As of 2024, there were 561 California Condors, with 344 living in the wild.
Back in 2016, a male California condor that was one of the last 23 condors in the world in the 1980s, was released back into the wild after 30 years in a domestic breeding program.
The bird, once named AC-4, and now re-tagged #20, soared out of his open pen at a canyon rim inside the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, in central California’s Kern County, near where he was first captured. It was the bird’s first free flight since 1985, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service -- in opposition to the National Audubon Society -- captured him near this same spot in a last-ditch attempt to stop the extinction of his species.
In 2022, an untagged California Condor was trapped to determine its parentage. It turned out his father was AC-4 (#20) and more amazingly AC-4 had hatched the chick alone after its mother #654 had died two weeks before its hatch date. AC-4 (#20) then went on to solo feed and care for the chick until it fledged out of the nest. Amazing!
AC-4, now tagged as Condor #20, is still is still flying free and, hopefully, producing more young.
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