A Condor at the Pinnacles

By Rusty Scalf
The unanticipated can seem like a monkey wrench into the gears, and yet prove to be a great stroke of luck. This happened to our Birdathon trip last weekend at Pinnacles National Park.
We had planned an hour of riparian birding near the campgrounds till the air warmed up enough for soaring California Condors. But we abruptly cancelled the riparian walk due to the number of people flooding the campground area on this spring weekend.
Instead we scooted up to stop 2, the Bear Gulch headquarters, just in time to have a California Condor alight in a snag next to the parking lot!
This bird gave us several minutes of spectaclar close viewing before dropping down to a deer carcass, a well picked over mountain lion kill easily within view. The morning never really warmed and this was to be our only California Condor — though a condor tracker we met on the trail had a total of 10 electronic “detections” of perched, radio-tagged birds on the mountain sides.

The hike up Condor Gulch trail was wonderful, with spactucular vistas unique to this special place. We had a nice bird list too, including Peregrine Falcon, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher and Calliope Hummingbird. Special thanks to our host, condor-tracking volunteer Richard Neidhardt.
Postscript: It turns out that the mate of “our” condor followed us back to the East Bay this week. The Oakland Zoo recently started a new partnership with the National Park Service where they will treat condors that have been found with high levels of lead in their bodies. Today the zoo received its first condor patient — condor number 444, the mate of number 340, the young male in these photographs. Lead poisoning is a significant threat to condors that eat carcasses containing the residue of lead ammunition. Although California passed legislation banning lead bullets in hunting, the law won’t take effect for several years, so there remains a continuing need to test and treat condors for lead poisoning.

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Rusty Scalf, who co-teaches GGBA’ Birds of the Bay Area class, led the Pinnacles field trip on April 26 as part of Birdathon 2014. But you can visit Pinnacles anytime! Spring is a lovely time to look for wildflowers there, as well as the park’s year-round population of 27 free-flying California Condors that have been reintroduced there since 2003. It’s about a 2.5-hour drive from San Francisco/Berkeley. Info on the park at www.nps.gov/pinn/index.htm.