Thread: Condor crosses U.S.-Mexico border

Friday, April 6, 2007 Contact Us Archive
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Condor crosses U.S.-Mexico border

By: North County Times -

SAN DIEGO -- San Diego Zoological Society officials announced Thursday that a California condor took a historic flight this week, when it crossed into the United States from Mexico.

Wednesday's flight was significant because it marked the first time since 1910 that a wild condor was known to be in San Diego County. The movement of the bird --hatched at the San Diego Wild Animal Park outside Escondido and released in Mexico in 2005 -- also was a milestone for the California Condor Recovery Program.

The program's goal is to boost the number of wild condors, whose wingspans of up to nine feet make them North America's largest birds. California condors once could be spotted from coast-to-coast, but hunting, pesticides and development caused the bird's population to fall to just 22 by the 1980s.


The U.S. Fish and Wildlife oversees the recovery program. Participants, including the zoological society, began releasing young condors on a ridgetop in Baja California's Sierra San Pedro de Martir National Park in 2002.

Three years later, the recovery team announced that two of those birds had been spotted flying within 15 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. Team leader Mike Wallace, who works for the zoological society, said Thursday that the bird now in the U.S. is a female known as Condor No. 321 that entered the country by flying along the Jucumbra Mountains and later was tracked to the Anza Borrego area via a global positioning transmitter attached to the bird.

The announcement came three days after Wallace announced his discovery of an egg laid by one of the released condors on the Baja ridge. He is scheduled to return there in the next few days to see if the egg has hatched.


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http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/04 ... 4_5_07.txt

A sign from above?

Finally someone crossing that border without papers that I'm happy to see.

So their numbers must be on the rise. They were brought to the brink of extinction and it took a lot of effort to prevent it. At least mankind has done at least one good thing this century so far.