Birds in danger

Press, 30 December 1976, Page 10

Birds in danger

By

MAX LAMBERT,

’. NZPA staff correspondent

in Washington

Reports this fall that the world’s whooping crane population has inched up to" 95 is good news for bird lovers. A programme to establish a second flock of whoopers j in the wild and to have some of the birds reared by } foster parent sandhill cranes ; in Idaho apparently is suct ceedmg. I More whooping cranes I survived to the migration j stage in Canada and the i United States this year than ■ in any other year since 1938. The giant, white birds : which winter on rhe south ■ Texas coast on the Gulf of Mexico, are still on the • endangered list but the lat- | est breeding success means 1 hope? are higher that the I whoopers can be rescued ! from the threat of extinction. Although the latest word on the cranes is heartening, the outlook for survival of another great bird in North America, the California coni dor. is not good. There are perhaps no more than 40 condors left, the remnants of a species that has soared through American skies for more than a million years. "Time is running out for the California condor,” says Sanford R. Wilbur, a research biologist in endangered wildlife with the United States Fish and Wiid- : lite Service. “The most endangered . bird in the world,” is the

way another biologist describes rhe condor. The bird is a shy scavenger. an ugly buzzard that is awkward on the ground. But aloft the condor, the largest land bird in North America, uses a 9ft wingspan to display almost unrivalled soaring" talents.

The condor withstood everything nature threw at him for century after century but the coming of the white man’s civilisation spelt ruin.

Now, unless something is done quickly, the California condor will soon be gone.

As recently’ as 100 years ago the bird ranged from Mexico's Baja peninsula to the Canadian border. Today, there is only’ one colony, living in the craggy wilderness of Los Padres National Forest, 50 ■ miles from Los Angeles. Naturalists are fighting to save the condor but are not united on how to do it. Some want to give all the help possible to the condors in their natural habitat to enable them to breed successfully.

Other groups are backing a plan to capture condors and try to breed them in captivity. Opponents of this measure say' that young birds raised in captivity could never be returned successfully to the wild. The artificial propagation of captured pairs is consid’ ered a last resort.

But a United States Forest Service official says: “If, within the next three years, there is not sufficient cause for optimism that field measures are finally turning the condor decline around, then captive, breeding should be initiated.”

One of the major problems faced by naturalists trying to reverse the decline in the bird’s population is that no-one knows why the condors are not reproducing. The remaining flock should produce four to six baby birds a year but recently the rate has dropped to two at the most. This year .there was only one active nesting and a single chick. Scientists believe that the colony needs four healthy new birds each year to keep its present number intact.

There are suspicions that pesticides are interfering with the birth-rate but noone is certain.

Mr Wilbur says “. , . The population is going down at an alarming rate. At tb/s point we don’t know-if the condor is a savable species.”