Condor Making a ‘Feisty’ Recovery After 2nd Surgery

A young California condor shot in the leg in the Santa Barbara County wilderness was recovering Friday from a second round of surgery.

Known officially as “Number 53,” the 13-month-old male condor is so feisty that he has earned the nickname, “Bad Boy,” said Dr. Stephen Klause, a veterinary surgeon who is donating his services to care for the wounded condor at the Los Angeles Zoo.

“He’s a handful,” Klause said Friday after the half-hour surgery. “He’s doing much better than expected at the moment. He’s gaining weight and getting feistier and feistier, which is good actually.”

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service officials in Ventura are investigating the shooting of the young condor, the first wounded by gunfire since scientists began releasing the nearly extinct birds into the wild in 1992.

In a 30-minute follow-up surgery, Klause took bacterial cultures from the bird’s wounded leg, repacked the wound with acrylic-like beads formed with high concentrations of antibiotics, then re-wrapped the leg. The condor remained under anesthesia for about an hour.

“Everybody has been more than surprised at how well the bird is doing,” Klause said. “It doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods by any means, but we’re encouraged at this point.”

Despite the favorable reports, the endangered bird will have to live the remainder of its expected 50-year life span in captivity, said Mike Wallace, a biologist who heads the condor recovery program at the Los Angeles Zoo.

“If by some miracle he can function perfectly on the leg, psychologically he has been compromised,” Wallace said. “He’s a young bird and highly influenced by the psychology of his care. He doesn’t have a strong opinion about people yet and now he’s having to be hand-fed just to stay alive.”

As a result, Wallace said, the naturally curious condor--which scientists trained to fear humans and stay clear of man-made invasions in his environment--will no longer view humans as the enemy, thus making it more likely he will be harmed again.

The condor was apparently shot by a small-caliber rifle. The bullet passed through the right leg, shattering the tarsometatarsal bone. In a first round of reconstructive surgeries, Klause cleaned the wound, took X-rays, removed dead bone and pieced the shattered bone together with 13 metal pins.

“When the bullet hit, it blasted the bone into a bunch of little pieces, so there’s quite a big gap of missing bone,” said Klause, who expects the bird will require multiple operations in the next year before the bone is repaired.

Now, however, the condor is able to walk on his leg, which is stabilized by the metal pins and protective cast.

Klause said while such operations and handling by humans can be traumatic to most birds, condors are quite literally tough buzzards.

“They’re pretty resilient birds and they appear to handle the stresses of anesthesia and the amount of handling that this bird needs, pretty well,” he said.

Zoo handlers must catch the condor twice a day, clean his wounds and give him antibiotic shots. The young condor, which weighs more than 15 pounds, was one of only 38 captive-bred California condors in the wild.

The remaining 115 California condors in existence are held in the captive breeding program at Los Angeles Zoo, San Diego Wild Animal Park and World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho. The 11-year condor breeding program is credited for saving the species from extinction.

The California condor is a federally endangered species. Under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, anyone convicted of shooting a California condor faces up to a year in federal prison and/or $1,000 in fines.