There’s something about condors. They’re kind of hard to look at closely until you get used to them. They look like vultures, but even more so. Neither species has a look that humans immediately appreciate. They don’t have the regal bearing of an eagle, or the mystical countenance of an owl, or the calm demeanor of a Mourning Dove. They’re ugly when you first look at them. And it’s a shocking kind of ugly. An orange head that wouldn’t look out of place on a clown. A ruffled collar that looks like it belongs on a 1930s movie villain’s coat. There is a point in those fashion choices, though. The reason that’s commonly given for the naked heads of condors (and vultures) is to keep the nasty organisms they encounter while sticking their heads into carrion from sticking to them. But I guess I don’t completely understand this. Bald Eagles are to an extent carrion feeders too, and not only are their heads covered with feathers, their head feathers are white. Go figure.
Whatever the reason is that they look the way they do, once you get past the surface appearance the condor is a spectacular creature. Besides the fact that they’re huge, they can fly hundreds of miles a day on thermals with the grace of… well, nothing else I can think of. You might think they’re looking for carrion, but they’re really searching for vultures. Vultures have a better sense of smell, so the condors depend on them to locate dinner. When the condors see the vultures on a carcass, they show up and drive the vultures off. Not to beat up on Bald Eagles again, but I’ve seen them do essentially the same thing. Thirty eagles watching the tailwater of a dam will mob the one who actually catches a fish. (This is not intended as political commentary.)
As of this writing, there are over 300 California Condors in the wild and over 200 in captivity. But they’re still on the precipice of non-existence. And they’re only doing as well as they are through intense assistance from humans. Every California Condor alive in the late ‘80s (22 or 24, depending on who you ask) was captured and the population was rebuilt through an extensive captive breeding program. Since reintroduction in 1991, the new wild population has been growing and in the last couple years has produced more condors born in the wild than die over the same period. But due to the hazards of lead fragments in parts of game animals formerly left in the field (the complete ban on all lead ammunition for all hunting in California took place in July 2019) and plastics ingested by young birds, condors are still certain to depend on human help for the foreseeable future.
If you’ve seen a condor in flight, you know that it’s worth the effort to keep them around. My wife and I saw six of them at Pinnacles National Monument a year or so ago, and didn’t mind the drive to get there from where we were staying at Morro Bay. It was late in the afternoon when we saw them. There were vultures soaring in the updrafts near the monument’s rock formations when in came three huge birds with white under their wings. A California Condor can weigh upwards of 20 pounds and can have a nine foot wingspan. Vultures are big birds (and graceful, effortless fliers) and the condors were in another class on both counts. We saw three more over a nearby peak. They’re at least as beautiful in flight as they are “ugly” up close.
California has a state bird that isn’t the condor. It’s the California Quail, a cute little busybody that has a question mark on its head. They’re a lot easier to find than condors (although neither is as common as a California Gull or a California Scrub-Jay). But when it came time to put something on the back of the statehood quarter with John Muir and Half Dome, it was the condor that got the nod.
Fortunately, on the quarter the condor’s head is too small to see what it really looks like.