Our Environment: "Big Sur & the California Condors" by Scott Turner

Our Environment: "Big Sur & the California Condors" by Scott Turner

For those of us used to East Coast beaches, Big Sur redefines oceanfront, with its rough and rugged mountains, angling sharply to a rocky, crashing coastline.

Our family was lucky to drive through some of this majestic terrain on the Pacific Coast Highway from Monterey, Calif. south for an hour and then back. This is a stretch of roadway that curves between deep coves, pummeling surf and soaring cliffs.

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The journey included a serendipitous encounter that occurred when we found a somewhat precarious precipice to pull-off and turn around. There, I noticed a young man with camera equipment aimed at a massive mountain.

When I asked what he was waiting for, he answered, “Condors.”

I asked the family to hold on, and in all of one minute, two California Condors came soaring toward the peak. These were huge birds. Indeed, the species is the largest native bird in North America.

I’d though that a condor would resemble an extra-large Turkey Vulture, but I was wrong. A condor holds its wings flat, while a vulture’s wings angle up and out. The condor wings are also wider and longer than that of a vulture, looking a little like planks of wood.

Moreover, a condor’s wingtips end in feathers that display a distinct finger look. Lastly, there are conspicuous white markings under the wings of adult condors. No such contrasting coloring exists in a Turkey Vulture.

I also learned something from the young man, who said that condors are so big that they require tall/high perches to take off. Then he pointed across a deep canyon to alone, towering conifer on an adjacent mountainside.

That, he said, is where the condors often perched.

By now, the rest of my family was out of the car and we were sharing binoculars to watch the condors. For the 5-10 minutes that we observed the birds, they didn’t flap once. Indeed, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology calls condors “masterful soarers,” which “rarely flap their wings.”

In the sunshine and wind, the condors floated near the top of a majestic peak. To make their flight silhouettes even easier for us study, other birds also soaring near the mountaintop included a Golden Eagle, two Turkey Vultures, a Red-tailed Hawk, and two Common Ravens. The latter two species appeared small compared to the condors.

Although I’ve observed birds in the wild for more than 40 years, I never thought that I’d see a California Condor.

These carrion scavenges were headed for extinction until the Endangered Species Act, paired with a captive breeding program began to reverse the species’ fortune, according to the Cornell Lab.

In 1987, some 27 California Condors were caught and brought into that captive breeding program. The more than 400 birds now soaring in the West descended from those 27 condors.

Protection and captured breeding continues, as the species remains critically endangered. The greatest threat to the birds is lead poisoning from ammunition fragments in carcasses that the birds eat, notes the Cornell Lab.

When we set out from Monterey 60 minutes earlier, we knew we’d see a remarkable landscape.

I am very happy that our adventure wasn’t preplanned.

Driving along until we decided to turn around led us to an unexpected encounter with two of North America’s most majestic creatures in one of the nation’s most fabled settings.

 

Scott Turner is a Providence-based writer and communications professional. For more than a decade he wrote for the Providence Journal and we welcome him to GoLocalProv.com.