Back In Condor Country

With all the recent rain, riding down into condor country would have been a rather wet experience. Indeed, Highway 1 was closed for part of the day the other day as a landslide was cleared from the roadway.

However, today was both a weekend day and a dry day (at the end of a few dry days), though the forecast was calling for wet weather to arrive towards the end of day and last for a few days which will lead to both bad riding conditions and the chance for more landslides.

Given all of the above, I had to go ride down the coast today. I've figured out a good compromise on camera equipment, whereby I can take my medium lens and the camera in a backpack where they're reasonably protected and I'm not too inconvenienced with the weight and bulk of them when I'm riding.

So, first thing Saturday morning I'm off to go hopefully have a good ride and see what I can see before the rain arrives.

As I'm approaching the condor hangout, I can see a large blob in the top of one of the trees. I pull over at the hangout and immediately see the one in the top of the tree and soon spot another one on the chimney of the house being built at this location.

As I'm standing there checking them out, a new (to me, it's her third week on the job) biologist intern turns up with her aerial and scanners - a lot of the insight in the rest of this post is thanks to her as we chatted for a good 20 minutes as I watched and she watched and scanned. Every time I've talked to one of these folks, I've learned a whole lot.

Both birds took off from their perches and ended up on the cliff just below where we were standing. Here you can see one of the birds, #375, as she glides past.


Both birds ended up just below us on the cliffs, as can be seen in the photo below. They're both juvenile birds (the black heads give that away - they don't turn pink until they're older than three years), and they're both female (thanks to the intern for that piece of info). Bird #444 (on the left with the tag that has a 44 on it - the third four is kind of a mystery) is a condor that was born in the wild on the central coast, the ultimate definition of the success so far of the preservation process.

These two birds started making their way up the cliffs and heading for bits of trash which prompted the intern to go get a water pistol to shoo them away. Condors can apparently put 3lbs of food in their gullet at a time, but if there's trash in their gullets, it takes away from the gullet's capacity and therefore they have to eat more frequently and are therefore more likely to starve, so if the biologists see birds eating trash, they shoo them away.

One strike with the water pistol and the birds were on their way.

While all this was going on, a small pod of dolphins was swimming past the sea lion colony 300 odd feet below.


Once the two juvenile condors headed around the corner, I carried on with my ride.

Later on my way back up the coast, I spotted the intern waving her aerial and a couple of turns later, spotted a few condors flying just over my head. Back up at their normal location, there were a couple more, so I pulled over again.

After a false start, I realized that thanks to the approaching storm, the wind was blowing in a different direction, so I had to head around the corner and there were three (including one of the juveniles I'd seen earlier) soaring around, as can be seen below.


One final thing I learned more from the intern today - there are different types of tag. Some birds have two, some birds have three and some birds (the breeding females) have the most expensive solar powered GPS tags that send in the details of the bird's travels every couple of days.

Having got back this afternoon in the dry, it has started raining this evening, hopefully the current storm doesn't bring any hillsides down.