Condor Watch Talk

Mystery Baby Condor Shows Up For Lunch. Name chosen!

  • wreness by wreness moderator

    Miracles happen and here's one to kick off 2015!

    I'll let the article give the details but an unknown baby condor showed up on the feeding cams at the Ventana Wildlife Society and no one had any idea it had been born! The VWS is the site where you see the cage our condors are feeding at as well as many others you would recognize. You can help choose a name for this new baby with this simple survey here Just fill in the name you'd like!

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    Mystery Condor Discovered

    updated: Jan 08, 2015, 2:14 PM - By Ventana Wildlife Society

    Over the holidays, Ventana Wildlife Society biologists discovered a mystery condor at its wildlife sanctuary in Big Sur, California. This juvenile condor was seen with adult condors, 209, aka "Shadow" and 231, aka "Wild 1", which are a breeding pair. This pair of condors is suspected of nesting in a remote portion of the Ventana Wilderness in the Arroyo Seco drainage and are the most likely parents for the mystery bird. Biologists have never entered the nest because of the area's inaccessibility.

    "This would be the third chick for 209, the suspected father, and is perhaps the best Christmas present we could ask for", said Kelly Sorenson, VWS executive director. "This is truly exciting to witness as it offers another example of condors surviving on their own."

    The total condor population now stands at 425 individuals (captive and wild) of which 116 are living in the wilds of California. Condor populations are also found in Baja California, Mexico, Arizona and Utah.

    To quote VWS biologist Joe Burnett, “Its just confirmation that this species can make it, that the habitat is still there, that there still is room for condors in the ecosystem and in the landscape that we share with them."

    “When we started releasing birds in 1997 a lot of people thought, 'Well, these birds will never figure it out,’ but you can’t un-program a species that has existed for millennia no matter how long it has been in captivity.”

    (note: you'd know the parents here on CondorWatch as tags Yellow 9 and Yellow 31)

    enter image description here

    Photo by David Moen

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  • CatchATiger by CatchATiger

    Score one for Mother Nature! This is great news.

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  • DZM by DZM admin

    So we get to help name this chick? 😄 How? What type of name are we looking for?

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  • wreness by wreness moderator

    I posted the link to the survey they had to send in the name - it was using a 3rd party web survey company - but the page was 404 so I'm not sure if they were getting hammered at the time or what. 😕 (I sent in "Phoenix"). I removed the link so people wouldn't get the same thing and thought I'd check today again.

    UPDATE: try this! Name the new condor (also put back in article 😃)

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  • ElisabethB by ElisabethB moderator

    I suggested 'wreness', just because ! 😄

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  • wreness by wreness moderator

    😛 I think that name has been banned on about 10 game sites, so he/she won't have much luck with it if they ever want to play anything good 😄

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  • vjbakker by vjbakker scientist

    Oh, I hope they pick wreness. That would be brilliant.

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  • wreness by wreness moderator

    UPDATE!! Baby named! Mystery solved!

    From the Ventana Wildlife Society:

    Over the holidays, Ventana Wildlife Society biologists noticed a young condor with no tags. After we determined who the parents were, we offered an opportunity for the public to name this bright and shiny new condor. As one person stated, “Isn’t it obvious?”. We agree and the voters of the naming poll agree as well. Two hundred seventy five name suggestions were given over the last eight days and 9% said Mystery.

    The runners up, by number of votes, were Surprise (5%) and names containing the word Wild (4%) such as Wild Child, Wild Shadow or our favorite Wild Thing, wrote one respondent, “because it makes our hearts sing-it makes everything groovy”.

    Some of our favorites also include Born Free, Freebird, Future, Hope and Liberty. Some names of people included Adam, Cooper, Jackie and Joe. Another favorite of ours was Moonbeam. In the realm of celebrities and fictional characters, we had Peter Pan, “because it seems to have appeared from Never-Never Land” one wrote, Condoreeza Rice, Condorleeza, and Sinead O’ Condor and one rather obscure but one we like anyway was Rhaegal after one of the dragons on Game of Thrones. Others we enjoyed were Sneaky Pete, Houdini, and Victory.

    Thanks to all that had fun with us and in welcoming to the world, our newest condor, named Mystery. And thanks to our supporters who have made it possible for condors to live free in the wild with little or no help from us.

    Sincerely,

    Kelly Sorenson
    Executive Director VWS

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  • DZM by DZM admin

    I like it! Mystery is cool. Welcome, Mystery!

    So how does Mystery get itself a tag?

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