All Vaxxed Up and Ready to Roost, Six Captive-Born Condors Fly Free
Condor number 1139 gawked at his enclosure’s open door, seemingly unsure what to make of it. He hesitated for several minutes. Then he stepped into the threshold, stretched out his nine-foot wingspan, and clumsily flapped a few feet down to the ground.
“Sometimes they go right out, sometimes they don’t. We’re on condor time,” said Joe Burnett, condor program manager at the Ventana Wildlife Society, which operates the central California condor release site, nestled in the mountainous chaparral along the coast.
On Tuesday, 1139 and five other juvenile California condors that received the avian influenza vaccine took their first flaps out of captivity from a release site at San Simeon on California’s Central Coast. This year’s rookies are the first birds in the U.S. to receive vaccines against the latest strain of avian influenza, which has devastated bird populations across the globe and killed at least 8,000 recorded wild birds across the country. Vaccinating captive-bred condors is the latest conservation effort in the decades-long quest to save the iconic endangered species from extinction.