The Los Angeles Zoo is capping off its 2024 California condor breeding season with a record-breaking 17 chicks hatched all of which might be candidates for launch into the wild as a part of the California Condor Restoration Program (CCRP).
The seventeenth and closing chick of the season hatched in June and is flourishing. The earlier document of 15 California condor chicks hatched on the LA Zoo was set in 1997.
Photographers have been at pains to seize this famously ugly fowl throughout the miracle of beginning, and the pictures have been introduced within the LA Instances as “Ugly-cute child pictures.”
“Our condor staff has raised the bar as soon as once more within the collaborative effort to avoid wasting America’s largest flying fowl from extinction,” mentioned Rose Legato, Curator of Birds on the Los Angeles Zoo.
“What we’re seeing now are the advantages of recent breeding and rearing methods developed and applied by our staff which put two or three condor chicks along with grownup surrogate condors to be raised. The result’s extra condor chicks in this system and in the end extra condors within the wild.”
In 2017, the LA Zoo pioneered a brand new breeding method the place animal care employees positioned two condor chicks with a surrogate condor to boost them. Till that point, no different zoo or CCRP companion had tried this course of. This yr, the zoo’s condor staff applied a way permitting three chicks to be raised on the similar time by a feminine—one other first for this system.
This triple brooding course of maximizes the zoo’s capability to boost condors with out human interplay which helps the birds simply modify when launched to the wild. It additionally permits breeding pairs to supply multiple viable egg in a season.
For the record-breaking 2024 breeding season, LA Zoo animal care employees efficiently reared three single chicks, eight chicks in double brood conditions, and 6 chicks in triple broods with grownup mentors.
The condor breeding program on the zoo began all the best way again in 1967 when a single particular person named Topa Topa got here to the zoo as a malnourished fledgling rescued within the wild. In 1983 there have been solely 22 California condors remaining on the planet, so the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Fish and Sport Fee agreed to create a captive breeding program for the species, which the LA Zoo entered as a founding companion.
As of December 2023, there are 561 California condors on this planet, of which 344 reside within the wild. The quantity fluctuates every day as a result of many outdoors influences.
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The California condor is the most important land fowl in North America with wings spanning virtually 10 toes. Grownup condors stand at round three toes tall and weigh 17 to 25 kilos. The species can soar to heights of 15,000 toes and should journey as much as 150 miles a day. Condors discover their meals principally by their eager eyesight.
Like vultures and different scavengers, condors are a part of nature’s cleansing crew, feeding on the carcasses of enormous mammals together with deer, cattle, and marine mammals equivalent to whales and seals.
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The LA Instances studies that the chicks will stay within the zoo’s take care of the subsequent yr and a half. After, as has been carried out earlier than with 250 chicks born on the zoo through the years, they are going to be evaluated for his or her potential to be launched again into the wild.
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