Condor Watch Talk

juvenile vs. adult appearance at condors

  • yshish by yshish

    hi guys,

    i tried to ask in the comments to this frame ,but nobody has answered yet and my question is already lost in the history now:]

    sometimes i can see condors who have juvenile appearance (black head, beak and feathers and brown eyes). in the guide page i found the info that the process growing into adults takes 5-6 years, but according to their bio and the date when the frame was taken, they should be older than 6 years. (f.e. the black 36 is aged 11 years on this frame).

    is there any explanation? are they able to change the face colour to black?

    thank you, i'm really confused.]

    z.

    Posted

  • ElisabethB by ElisabethB moderator

    Sorry, that we let this slide. Unfortunately, I have no idea. I'll try and alert the science team .

    Posted

  • myraf by myraf scientist

    HI yshish and ElisabethB !. No, adult condors can not change their colors back to black. This is certainly a juvenile and it might be a problem with the tag to bio link as black 36 was condor 336 (a central CA bird) but unfortunately she died of lead poisoning in 2008 and in 2010 black 26 was used to identify condor 536 (a Southern CA bird). The website program is supposed to differentiate between central and southern CA photos to prevent this from happening but this is my best explanation. I will check into this to see if we can fix this issue. The good news is that the data you would enter w (black 36) will be identified with the correct condor during our post-processing. Thanks very much for your question and work on Condor Watch!

    Posted

  • vjbakker by vjbakker scientist

    Hopefully not adding more confusion here, but since I've been tracking this frustrating tag issue most closely, I'll add my 2 cents. This is 536 born in 2009, and thus it is a juvenile as you all astutely observed. I believe the website identified it as 236, which hatched in 2001. We did initially have a problem with the website not first filtering photos by location (So Cal vs Central Cal) prior to assigning IDs, but I believe that issue has been corrected. The current problem seems to be that the website is not accounting for tag pattern when it makes assignments (in So Cal, Black 36 2dots is 236 while Black 36 no dots is 536). I've asked for this to be fixed several times over the last month and it seems the wheels just turn slowly. I apologize, and if I could fix it myself I would, but I am hopeful that it will be fixed soon. Thanks for your patience and all your hard work!

    Posted

  • vjbakker by vjbakker scientist

    Yes, that would be great if you could. Thank you!!

    Posted

  • wreness by wreness moderator

    miltonbosch has posted this Inaccurate Bio board.

    It'd be most helpful if you could post the ones you find there so we can continue to keep them all in one place. Thanks for all your help!

    Posted

  • myraf by myraf scientist

    I just left a comment with the photos but will also answer to this thread. Can you tell me if the bio is listing the wrong bird, or just the wrong age? For both these posts, the bird is indeed a juvenile so there is something wrong with the bio that is coming up. But in this and all cases where the bio might be wrong, we are collecting the data you enter, so even if your bio comes up wrong, we can use the data. Thanks very much!

    Posted

  • yshish by yshish in response to myraf's comment.

    oh, someone deleted my post before i had time to read the answers.(

    i can't say, if the bio is listing for wrong bird or not, because i cannot say, what colour is the wing tag. it could be anything, it's hidden behind the vegetation. but i can read the number, which is 70. but it listed bio of bird 370 (it would mean, that the colour is blue and the bird was born 2005, so the bird would be 7 years old in this frame).

    i was just surprised to see listed any bio, when i didn't mark the colour of wing tag. later that day i got black 70. so i got a proof, that the blue wing tag is not the only 70 in this data set. so it couldn't know, which 70 wing tag to list! and it doesn't seem to be alright to me.

    hope it's more clear. sorry for my English.

    Posted

  • wreness by wreness moderator

    You also posted this on the Inaccurate Tag board and it is answered there, and it's also answered on the original photo comment. Both are still there.

    I removed the 3rd post from here so we can put all the inaccurate bios on the correct board. If you put in 70 and no tag color it would have given you the bio for 370 by default, I believe since that was the first year any '70' tag is in the database. That's why, unless we have the entire, correct tag we might end up with not-correct information for the tag. Computers only "think" as well as the info we give them (which is scary) 😃

    Hope this helps!

    Posted

  • yshish by yshish in response to wreness's comment.

    yeah, i know that my posts were also in the inaccurate tag board. i just didn't remember which was the one that @myraf commented here. i'm afraid i wrote details about different image than i was asked to. because i can't see any comment by miraf at the image with the 70 wing tag. hopefully it's not a big issue:]

    Posted