Condor Cam
If you tune in at the right time, you might catch up to 25 California condors in front of this new live-streaming camera. [readon]
It’s the new Condor Cam in the remote hills of Big Sur, set up by the Ventana Wildlife Society to help keep an eye on how condors are doing.
There are only 429 of North America’s largest bird alive today, and half of them live in zoos. Over the last 20 years, biologists have been breeding them in captivity and gradually reintroducing them to remote areas of California and Arizona.
Condors are scavengers, and the wildlife team brings lunch to where the camera is set up. Lunch consists mainly of animals who have died naturally – mostly stillborn calves.
This week, biologists with the VWS also released three condors who were raised in captivity. It was all caught on the live cam.
The video also helps the team keep an eye on their health – especially whether they are exhibiting signs of lead poisoning from eating dead animals with lead bullet fragments in them.
“We have to drive one-and-a-half hours up a dirt road behind five locked gates just to get to this place,” Sorenson said. “It’s an all-day thing. So this is an amazing tool for us to help monitor condors in the wild.”
Check out the streaming camera.