BONUS POST: California Condors

Condor photos copyright Gabriel Skvor.

       Although as I blog, I will mainly be blogging about what I see that day (a daily journal), over the past year I have had some pretty amazing encounters, so I thought I would share one with you.  When I and my family were in California last summer, we had the privilege of being able to view 6 California Condors.  They were near Big Sur.  We talked to a ranger and told him that we really wanted to view condors.  He told us that he saw them on an A-Frame house, a few miles up the highway.  We pulled over, and sure enough we saw them.  There were 6!  It was amazing, because they are so large.  A Turkey Vulture flew by us, and then joined the condors.  What was amazing, is when seeing the large turkey vulture, next to the massive condors, I stated "the Turkey Vulture looked like a sparrow!", since the condors were so huge.  At one time in 1987, due to poaching, lead poisoning, and habitat destruction, there were only 22 known living condors.  These birds were taken captive to the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and the Los Angeles Zoo.  While bred in captivity, numbers rose.  Condors slowly began to be released back into the wild.  As of March 2010, there are 349 known living condors, with 180 of them being in the wild.  The California Condor remains a Critically Endangered Species.