Condor Project

Entry, Experiences
Jana Mazor-Thomas, Tufts

Last June, I was lucky enough to go on what is pretty much my dream externship: working with Dr. John Bryan of the National Park Service, on the California Condor recovery project at Pinnacles National Monument.

For those who are not obsessed with birds, the appeal of this is probably a little hard to imagine. Condors are huge, stinky, sometimes angry birds. They live primarily on carrion and the bacteria in their mouths are the ones that are nasty enough to out-compete all the bacteria that grow on dead animals. They're also unbelievably beautiful, critically endangered, the largest bird in North America - and a fantastic story about how medical care and the dedication of hundreds of people kept this apex species from extinction and now on the road to recovery. So for a bird nerd? Yes, the elective of a lifetime.

The biggest source of mortality for the condors is still lead poisoning from bullets left in carcasses by hunters. Medically, most of the work done revolves around treatment for lead poisoning. At least twice a year, the condor crew try to trap every condor in their management area and check their lead levels, then chelate them if need be. Sadly, their lower cutoff for birds that need chelation has to be well above what we consider acceptable in other raptors, because otherwise, nearly every condor would still be in captivity for treatment, and the goal of this project is to return these birds to a life in the wild that does not require human intervention. 

Capturing and restraining an easily-stressed bird with a ten-foot wing span is not a job for the faint of heart!Here's four of us working to draw blood from one birdThe crew at Pinnacles are absolute professionals at all aspects of this, and they were exceptionally patient with me as I tried to learn their restraint techniques.

Me drawing blood. Critically endangered species. No big deal!As I found out while working with them, the medical care for the condors is really only one small part of the project. Another major goal for our visit was to set up a new mobile radiology unit out at the park site. Before the arrival of this unit, condors needing radiographs had to be transported several hours by car, which is a major source of stress for these birds. Also, the park has an ongoing research project matching the isotopes of lead from condor blood to the bullets retrieved from carcasses - and how do you know when there's a bullet in a carcass? You radiograph it, that's how.

However, the new unit arrived without much in the way of technique charts (and I don't know of a unit in the world that has presets for rotten carcasses). This plunged me into a project I totally did not expect, and one that was a blast to participate in.

Our first job was for three amateurs with pretty limited carpentry equipment to construct a platform and mount out of warped scrap lumber. I ended up drawing on (limited) memories of high school trigonometry to figure out angles and wood lengths for a 30-60-90 triangle for the sides. After a hilarious afternoon of construction, this resulted in the extremely professional apparatus you can partially see here:

The deer in the picture is actually one of the least rotten of the bodies I radiographed while working up technique charts. Most of them were dead pigs in much worse shape - and nothing in this world smells as bad as a really rotten pig. Still, if you have to wrestle disgusting things, there are far worse places to do it than California in the summer sunshine; and there are far worse people to do it with than the crew out at Pinnacles, who were a delight to work with even for the grossest of tasks.

On the days when we weren't testing birds or wrestling carcasses, I also got to participate in some other aspects of the management project. The birds are monitored using telemetry on radio tags, but to track the signal you have to hike up a mountain and wave the giant receiver around. Not a bad way to spend a day!

And then, of course, there were days when we got to do the best part of the project: return the birds back to the wild - always exciting. Some birds leave with a little more attitude than others:

Overall, though, every day on this rotation was a great one. Half of the things I did didn't draw on my veterinary experience so much as an ability to improvise solutions to problems you didn't even know you were going to have. The biggest thing I learned from it is that it doesn't matter so much what the work itself is - if you are doing work that matters, with great people, you can't ask for more.