California Condor Nesting Drama

California Condor Nesting Drama
H/T Ben Moskalensky 

A pair of endangered California Condors lost an egg to predators. Scientists substituted a fake egg and then replaced it with an egg from a Condor in captivity.

The result, an new Condor born in the wild.

#nature   #CaliforniaCondor   #endangeredspecies  

Originally shared by Rex Graham

A pair of California Condors became parents in 2016 thanks to an improbable wildlife spy team that included cliff-climbing biologists, a zoo, and a live Internet cam. https://goo.gl/K3Kosz

The spectacle began on a morning in March 2016, after the sun came up. The nest cam at Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge revealed that the egg of condors #111 and #509 was missing. A predator probably took it.

The biologists leading the California Condor Recovery Program may not think of themselves as #007s , but without hesitation they sprang into action as wildlife special agents.

They immediately replaced the missing egg with a lookalike dummy.

The parents didn't seem to notice.

In fact, the condors incubated and protected what they seemed to think was their own egg. On the surface, the remote Ventura County, California, scene looked calm.

However, a sense of urgency shot through the zoo, a kingpin in the recovery program. Luckily, a captive-bred egg in a zoo incubator was close to hatching.

On April 2, the special agents substituted that egg for the dummy in the Hopper Mountain nest. Amazingly, the parents instantly accepted the zoo egg. To thousands of nest-cam viewers it must have looked like another ho-hum day in the recovery of a critically endangered bird.

Read more – https://goo.gl/K3Kosz