Next-to-Last Condor Known Left in the Wild Captured

Biologists captured one of two known remaining California condors in the wild Friday and brought it to the San Diego Wild Animal Park to join a captive-breeding program for the highly endangered species.

The bird, known both as AC-5 and as the Sequoia Male, was caught in a net around sunset while feeding on private land in the Tehachapi Mountains of southern Kern County, said Joe Dowhan, an official with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Condor Research Center.

The bird was brought by airplane to the wild animal park where veterinarians found it in good physical condition, Dowhan said. The bird, which weighed 19 1/2 pounds, was placed in protective quarantine before being added to the 12 condors already in the park’s breeding program. There are 13 condors in a similar breeding program at the Los Angeles Zoo.

AC-5 is particularly valuable to the breeding program because his genetic material is under-represented among the 27 living condors, Dowhan said. The bird is known to have sired only one offspring, a 2 1/2-year-old male named Sequoia who was taken as a chick from a cliff-side nest in October, 1984. His female mate disappeared that winter, along with five others, and was never found.

Biologists hope to capture the remaining condor by spring. If sufficient numbers are bred at the two zoos, releases back into protected natural areas will begin between 1990 and 1992, they said. In December, the Fish and Wildlife Service bought the 11,500-acre Hudson Ranch in southern Kern County as a future condor refuge. It has been renamed the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge.