The California condor was pushed to the brink of extinction
when there were only 22 birds left in the world.
Imagine that!
22.
This was because of pressures put on by human activities.
The condor dates back to the Pleistocene.
So some of the animals that have been talked about today that lived in the day:
Harlan's giant sloth, the American mastodon, the saber-toothed cat.
The condor lived among those.
Can you imagine?
But it was the only one of them to survive to today.
After 10,000 years, fossil records show
that it was in upstate New York and northern Florida.
And then as European settlers pushed across the country,
its last stronghold was from Vancouver to Baja Mexico.
The condor is unique.
It's the largest flying bird in North America
with a nine-and-a-half foot wingspan - that's two feet more than this.
It lives more than 60 years.
As a K-select species, it has a slow reproductive rate.
And it's sexually mature about five to six years.
After those 10,000 years,
in 1987, there was a great debate.
The condor was declining at such a rapid rate,
there was fear of losing it to extinction.
It was from contaminants in the wild, such as lead and DDT,
and electrocutions and collisions with power lines and power polls.
On one hand, a group of people were saying,
"Let the species die in dignity."
On the other hand,
a group of people saying this was not a naturally occurring extinction,
and that we had a responsibility to intervene.
So after lawsuits and debates, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
took the bold step of safeguarding the condor
while some of these issues were being resolved by placing the remaining birds
in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Los Angeles Zoo.
After 10,000 years, the condor was extinct in the wild.
Now, you can imagine the weight on those two zoos
with given these birds to care for
and making sure they didn't go extinct on our watch.
We had to draw on a variety of resources.
We had to use what I call "Conservation innovation,"
literally writing the book as we were trying to save the species.
We had to draw on our own experience working with closely related species
like the Andean condor and other avian species.
But we had to quickly assemble a variety of resources and science.
We had to design and construct breeding centers like this one at the safari park.
This is a series of aviaries with nest chambers associated with it.
There were folks who said we would never be able to breed this species in a zoo.
The entire goal was always to release the bird back into the wild.
So we had to take certain steps as we progressed towards that.
We had to even design in the facility, you can see in this slide,
[concertina] wire on the top of the perimeter fence.
The reason for that is the debate was so contentious about condors
that people were threatening to break in
and release the condors back into harm's way.
I can remember spending a few nights myself out at the park,
making sure that didn't happen.
We had to employ techniques like double-clutching.
In the wild, a condor raises one chick every two years.
But by using this technique of double-clutching,
we removed the first egg
and placed it safely in an incubator
and then hatched it.
That allowed the parents to raise what's called a replacement egg.
So in that same two-year period,
we were able to produce four chicks instead of just one.
Now, we were concerned about the birds imprinting.
Again, the goal of releasing them back into the wild.
And so we developed hand puppets.
And just to the side on that hand puppet is one of our dedicated keeper staff,
working round the clock to feed and care for that chick.
That puppet became its lifeline:
It fed the chick,
it socialized with the chick,
and it played with the chick.
At some point in that chick's life, it is placed in an area
where it had the chance to look out through a portal and see other condors,
so that it starts to understand what it's going to be.
During this process - that's about six months from the time it's hatched
until the time it's fledged.
And sometimes when we fledge them
if they're not fledging with their parents,
they're fledging them with mentors.
Again the goal of reestablishing the species in the wild.
In our labs at the San Diego Zoo, Center for Conservation Research,
we had to make sure that we addressed the issues of genetics.
When the population was just at 22 birds, every individual was mapped genetically,
so we knew the relatedness to each other.
This was paramount when you're dealing with such a small population
because we know the effects of inbreeding with other species.
Once those identifiers were made, then we took computer models,
and we put all that data in there.
And then from there, the parents were determined.
Now fortunately, condors are very user-friendly this way.
When we put just two birds together, just based on data and not behavior,
most times they reproduced.
This was imperative.
Also in those same labs,
for the first time,
a process was developed to determine the gender of birds using DNA.
This was from membranes left in the hatched eggs.
This was really important for us also
as we started to establish those new pairings
that we were able to put them together at the appropriate ages
because otherwise we'd have to wait five or six years
to be sexually mature to know what genders they were.
Also, in genetically managing the population, we had to make sure
that as we established new breeding centers,
and we started to put birds back out
into various release sites in California, Arizona and Baja, Mexico,
that we wanted to replicate the genes,
so in the event there was a catastrophic event
like a wild fire or a disease outbreak, we had safeguarded all the genetic lines.
Now, some of the known factors that I mentioned with causing
the demise and decline of condors was the collision with power lines
and roosting on power structures.
Now you ask, "Roosting on a power structure, a lot of birds do that?"
But with a nine-and-a-half foot wingspan, they would touch wires and transformers,
and electrocute themselves.
So we used a technique,
working with a local utility company to receive power poles.
These mock power poles, we would then wire to deliver a mild electric charge.
Condors are a very bright species, very inquisitive.
Bright enough to know that if it landed on one of those power poles
and received a shock once or twice, they would stop that behavior.
That behavior modification directly translated to what happened in the field.
When we released condors back into the wild,
they stopped roosting on some of those areas that had been hazardous to them.
Now, they still flew into some power lines,
and the reason for that is when you evolve like a condor,
and you make your living by riding thermals,
you don't need to look ahead when you're a thousand feet in the air.
And when you came up to a ridgeline riding a thermal
and there was a power line, it would create these collisions.
But the utility companies, once they realized that,
started to bury their power lines in those key areas.
Now, in a program like this that's been going on for thirty years,
some of these factors you can anticipate,
some you can't.
No one could've predicted
that West Nile virus would arrive in the United States in 1999,
and quickly sweep across the country,
taking with it human life, as well as a lot of avian species.
And the condors were not immune. We lost condors to West Nile virus.
But the Center for Disease Control developed a vaccine that we used
that required us to vaccinate every condor in the population.
Easy to say, but more difficult to do
when you've got birds in the wild as well as in the breeding centers.
And once they're vaccinated, then they have to receive a booster every year.
Rather monumental thing that we have to do but to safeguard the population.
Now, one of the things that we also learned
is the environment that we're putting condors back into was fairly dirty.
And we underestimated that.
This is what we call microtrash.
It's items that people leave behind when they're out enjoying nature.
It's bottle caps and pieces of glass and plastic and electrical devices.
And you can see by this radiograph that microtrash in the body of a condor.
It requires surgery to remove it.
For the parents, they ingest this microtrash.
We're not completely certain why, but the theory is that condors,
during certain times, take in small pieces of bone for calcium,
particularly when females are getting ready to lay an egg.
That behavior seems to have drifted to picking up these small pieces
of what they believe are bone, and it's actually microtrash.
Now, condors serve an important ecological niche.
They're a scavenging species.
Why that's important is because they clean up the environment
when an animal dies.
They go down and feed on those carcasses.
Growing in those carcasses are toxins like botulism and anthrax.
Those are harmful to us; they're certainly harmful to other species of wildlife.
And condors are immune to these types of toxins, and so they clean it up.
But in that behavior, they're indiscriminate feeders
when they're feeding on a carcass.
They're ingesting tissue and organ, and small pieces of bone.
And sometimes they ingest lead - lead from sport hunting.
Now, I have to tell you that hunters have been on this planet
since the dawn of man.
And the hunting community generates 8 billion dollars a year for conservation.
And it's important that programs like that are sustainable.
But as condors ingest this lead, it's toxic to them,
as it is to other life forms.
This is a radiograph of a piece of lead that was taken out of a condor.
Now, some of our greatest conservationists, I have to say,
people like John James Audubon, President Theodore Roosevelt, were avid hunters,
but they were more passionate conservationists.
So it isn't a issue of sport hunting; it's an issue of toxin in an environment.
And one of the ways that it is is through lead.
We've had lead in other products. We've had lead in paint.
And we found out that children mouthing on their toys,
chewing on their cribs,
were ingesting lead through paint.
And it was removed from that product. It was removed from gasoline.
Lead was even removed from shotgun shells and replaced with steel
because it was causing problems with waterfowl.
So we have the ability to make adjustments in programs like this
as it affects wildlife and humans.
Now, in a program like this, we also have to anticipate
what the next challenge might be.
And I have to say that with wind turbines coming into United States,
it is a good green initiative to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.
And wind energy is one of those alternatives.
And to date, there's never been a condor taken by a turbine.
But turbines have affected other raptors like eagles and hawks.
And so we're working with utility companies,
these wind energy companies,
to develop techniques to reduce the threat.
One way to do that is looking at condors and how they utilize their habitat
through spatial ecology.
That's not just looking at how condors fly north, south, east and west,
but how they fly in that third dimension, in elevation,
and working with companies to see if they're willing to adjust the field,
based on a condor's activity
and understanding why condors use the habitat that they use.
That's part of the research that's going on.
Another way that we're working with utility companies
is early detection systems.
Condors outfitted with devices that would send a signal
as they proceeded towards a turbine field -
one that's existing or one that's in planning.
What that would allow those energy companies to do
is turn down or turn off those turbines as those condors were flying through.
In a program like this, it is imperative to have collaboration
from so many different people and organizations.
No one entity can do it by themselves,
but collectively it's, as we've seen, possible.
So where are we today?
We started with 22 condors left in the world.
Now we have more than 400,
more than half of those flying free
in the skies of California, Arizona and Baja, Mexico.
The program has gone full cycle.
Whereas you can see, there's an egg in the wild that's about to hatch.
That dark spot on that egg is a "pip" site.
That is a chick about to emerge.
And the picture on the bottom right shows a chick that hatched in the wild.
Birds that were raised in zoos and breeding centers and released
are now carrying out the life cycle themselves in the wild.
So people ask me all the time, "Why?"
And we've heard this today,
"Why spend so much resource and so much energy to save a species?"
If you look at these species like condors and pandas and elephant and tiger,
we share the same environments around this planet as they do.
We live in the same places.
If you look at them as environmental indicators, they're telling us
how healthy the environment is that we share with them.
What we've got to do is listen to what they're saying
We have the ability to affect change.
We've seen that.
We've had the ability to affect change around the world.
We just have to make sure that we continue those efforts
because it is all possible.
Thank you.
(Applause)