Ventana Wildlife Society’s Condor Project has been releasing condors in the hills above San Simeon, south of Piedras Blancas, to establish a Central Coast flock. None has come out to feed at the beach, yet. Perhaps this whale will attract them to a new food source.
When a gray whale washed up dead in Big Sur in 2012, about 60 condors came to feast, from as far away as Pinnacles National Park. That was the first time condors feeding on a whale was documented since the Lewis & Clark expedition.
Condors are obligate scavengers. They eat only dead animals. That whale was safe food, uncontaminated by lead. Condors are at risk of lead poisoning when ingesting fragments of spent ammunition in the carcasses they scavenge. That exposure could happen, for example, when they find gut piles left behind from large game shot by hunters. Condors might also be exposed to lead when scavenging ground squirrel carcasses on rural ranches. Ranchers often shoot ground squirrels and other small non-game mammals that they perceive as pests.
A solid meal of two or three pounds of food would hold a condor for a week or more. One or two whales a year could feed the whole flock.
“The smell of a rotting carcass blows up the canyons on the prevailing north wind,” said Joe Burnett, Ventana Wildlife Society’s Condor Project coordinator and senior biologist.
Perhaps the fragrance of rotting whale will attract the young condors in the flock, the ones with black heads, to venture to the beach.
This photo is of the Big Sur flock, and includes the adults with pink heads.