Another Close Condor Call

A9 — one of the North Coast’s 18 California condors — is once again flying free following weeks of intensive medical treatment at the Sequoia Park Zoo due to a potentially lethal case of lead poisoning.

The Northern California Condor Restoration Program — a Yurok Tribe-led effort to reestablish a self-sustaining population of the bird they know as prey-go-neesh on their ancestral lands in partnership with Redwood National and State Parks — described the situation, which saw eight other birds show elevated lead levels during a recent exam in addition to A9’s near-death experience, as “alarming.”

“Ingestion of lead fragments from spent ammunition remains the single biggest threat to condors in the wild,” a NCCRP social media post states, noting nearly half of all condor deaths in the wild are due to consuming carrion tainted by lead ammunition.

NCCRP Manager and Yurok Wildlife Department Senior Biologist Chris West says A9 was released back into the wild Monday, a few hours after tests finally “got to the low levels” the entire care team had been waiting for since late October, noting they had all been “quite stressed” about the bird’s condition.

While keeping A9 at the program’s release site in the Bald Hills area after the bird was discharged from treatment at the zoo was a consideration, West said the fact that he maintained his weight and gained strength over the course of treatment — plus the strong weather system about to hit — made sending A9 back out the best course.

Watching A9 take back to the skies, West says, “was pretty emotional for all of the crew.”

“We were ecstatic,” he says.

But, he notes, the fact that half of the endangered birds in the North Coast’s flocks had elevated levels of lead, with A9’s life on the line, is “certainly considerable.”

Just released into the wild for the first time in early October, A9’s potentially lethal exposure was detected only a few weeks later during the annual fall exam, a time when the entire flock is brought in for not only a hands-on assessment but a chance to make any needed repairs to the birds’ satellite transmitters and identification tags.

Due to the lead levels detected in the blood work-ups, A9 was immediately placed on chelation therapy to flush the toxin from his system at the Sequoia Park Zoo.

In a small silver lining, X-rays on A9 at the zoo “did not reveal any large lead fragments which would require transport to the advanced life support facilities at the Oakland Zoo,” the NCCRP said.

The other birds had lead levels lower than the threshold at which chelation therapy is needed, the program states, noting the treatment that “requires daily medication injections and fluid administration” is “often life saving” but also carries risks, including potential organ damage.

“This is why birds with low levels of lead exposure are allowed to slowly clear their systems on their own if the toxicosis does not seem life threatening,” the NCCRP post says. “Lead isotope analysis will be performed on blood samples to better understand the sources of the lead in the NCCRP flock.”

As an apex scavenger, condors serve as nature’s clean-up crew, scouring the landscape of large carcasses and, in turn, helping prevent the spread of diseases. But that ecological role also makes the largest bird in North America — boasting a nearly 10-foot wingspan and weighing 20 pounds or more — vulnerable to lead poisoning, which is believed to be one of the main causes of birds’ near extinction.

California condors were declared endangered back in 1967, when fewer than 100 survived outside of zoos. But as the wild population continued to dwindle over the next 20 years — with only 22 remaining in a small pocket of mountainous area in Southern California — they were placed into captive breeding programs in 1987 in a race against time to save the bird.

Through that intensive effort, the population has slowly inched up over the decades to around 500, with around 350 flying free in California and other parts of the Southwest and Mexico through reintroduction programs.

Those include the 18 now soaring in the North Coast’s skies, the result of decades of work by the Yurok Tribe to bring prey-go-neesh — a bird that the tribe and many Indigenous cultures consider sacred — back to their ancestral lands, with the first arriving in 2022.

But condors remain critically endangered — and this isn’t the first time the fledgling flock has had a near miss.

During last October’s routine check-ups, another local condor, A6, also needed to undergo treatment at the Sequoia Park Zoo, while five other condors were found to have elevated levels of the toxin after they ate remains of an elk killed by a poacher in Redwood National and State Parks, which was believed to be the contamination source.

In comparison to the three rounds needed to flush the toxin from A9’s system due to the extremely high levels, A6 only needed a single treatment, West says.

A6’s health scare came on the heels of another close call a year earlier, when two tainted elk were found within the North Coast condors’ range — with just one of the poached animals containing enough lead bullet fragments to kill several condors, according to the Yurok Tribe.

At the time, West described that incident as being “as close as you can get to a worst-case scenario.”

In the years before the first condors in more than a century arrived back on Yurok ancestral lands, the tribe worked extensively to educate local hunters about non-lead ammunition options. And, in 2019, California banned the use of lead ammunition for hunting.

But the problem continues, with the NCCRP noting a “substantive amount of our crews’ time is focused on lead management, including removing lead tainted animal remains from the landscape, radiographing potentially tainted, wild food items encountered before allowing them to be accessed by the birds, and engaging in non-lead ammunition outreach.”

“Despite this, the only way for prey-go-neesh to persist without intensive human intervention is by eliminating the use of lead ammunition and a transition to non-lead alternatives,” the update says. “Engaging proactively with the shooting community to empower them with knowledge about the effects of lead on wildlife is critically important. This community can provide clean offal to our wild scavengers, spread the word to others with their passion for the outdoors about non-lead shooting options, and can again allow humans to be an integral part of healthy food-chains and ecosystems.”

Earlier this week, the Sequoia Park Zoo also posted an update about A9, noting that “outside of his treatments, he is spending his time resting, and staff are minimizing his human exposure while also working to bulk him up with various food offerings.”

And, the zoo echoed the NCCRP’s plea about the dangers of lead ammunition.

“Please remember that lead poisoning is still the greatest threat to all wild California condors,” the post says. “For the health of people, domestic animals and all wildlife, lead must be removed from our environment. The success of wild condor recovery relies on our transition to nonlead ammunition to remove lead from the wild food chain.”

Kimberly Wear (she/her) is the Journal’s digital editor. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 323, or kim@northcoastjournal.com.