Condor Watch Talk

'Unknown' tagged condors

  • wreness by wreness moderator

    I was just curious why there are tagged condors whose tag data isn't on file and so who show up as "unknown". I'd think every one that is tagged would have every detail down somewhere, down to their favorite blood type. I have found a lot of these birds in these pictures. I can't imagine that the Taggers didn't record the info since there are so few precious condors. Is the data just not in this database (yet?) or not in the Universal Galactic Condor database?

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  • myraf by myraf scientist

    Hi Wreness! We are working on this but yes, you are right and those birds are known by their field biologists - who basically track them every day. It is just the three different release sites have used different tagging systems over the years and sometimes tags on birds get changed so that a bird can have more than four different tags that need to trace back to him/her. So we are working on our "Universal Galactic Condor database" (nice name!), but it is (like all things condors) complicated. Another thing is if a bird loses their tag the field crews will place a temporary one on the bird for a few weeks or a month or two (until they can trap the bird again) but those small time scales tag changes are not easy to track years later. As these tags were/are used for real-time identification people were not thinking that many years later we would need to track that temporary tag back to a bird. We are working on getting it better, so keep tagging the photos with mis IDs so we can try and fix the issue, and also encourage others to tag them until our Universal Galactic Condor database is complete. Thank you!

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  • wreness by wreness moderator

    Thanks! Yikes, lotta work for you guys (that's why they call it 'work') Interesting because I noticed, especially the white tags, are really lousy tags and I said Those almost look home made/hand made - I bet they were 😃 The condors need something like Carfax has for cars - a running printout of all maintenance, handily pulled up. All oil changes, all tag changes. One number, same bird for life, the data changes go with the Universal Galactic CondorFax. 😄

    This is all amazing...thanks!

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