07/26/2026
Biologists swapped a thin-shelled condor egg with a zoo egg inside a cliff cave at Pinnacles National Monument, and the wild parents hatched and raised it as the first California condor born at Pinnacles in over a century. Fifty days later, the chick was poisoned with lead. They climbed back into the cave and injected her with chelation drugs. She got worse. They pulled her out, treated her at the Los Angeles Zoo for months, released her back at Pinnacles a year later, and watched her fly to the Big Sur coast, find a mate, and raise chicks of her own.
Condors 317 and 318 were the first breeding pair at Pinnacles. The female, 317, had been released at the monument in 2004. The male, 318, was released along the Big Sur coast by the Ventana Wildlife Society. They found each other, performed courtship displays through the winter of 2009, and in March 2010, a biologist confirmed an egg in a cave high on the rocky cliffs of the High Peaks, visible from a public trail bench a safe distance away. It was the first condor nest at Pinnacles in more than 100 years.
The egg worried the biologists. Residual DDT contamination, still cycling through the food chain decades after the pesticide was banned, was thinning condor eggshells across the recovery zone. A thin-shelled egg can crack under the weight of an incubating parent. To increase the chances of a successful hatch and study the thinning, the team climbed to the cave, removed the original egg, and replaced it with a fertile egg from the San Diego Zoo breeding program. The parents accepted it without hesitation.
On March 24, 2010, Condor 550 hatched. She was the first California condor born at Pinnacles in more than a century. National Park Service wildlife biologist Daniel George reported that the first-time parents were exhibiting normal behavior, regularly feeding and incubating the new nestling. The chick grew. The public hiked two miles uphill to watch from the viewing area. Everything was working.
Then the blood tests came back.
At roughly 50 days old, 550 showed extremely high lead levels. Her father, 318, was also toxic. Condors are exclusively scavengers. They eat dead mammals. When a deer, calf, or pig is shot and the carcass or gut pile is left in the field, lead fragments from the ammunition spread through the tissue. A condor that feeds on that carcass ingests the fragments. Lead accumulates. It destroys the nervous system, the kidneys, and the blood's ability to carry oxygen. It is the leading cause of death in wild California condors.
The father was trapped and driven to the Los Angeles Zoo for chelation. The chick was too young and too fragile to move. Biologists climbed into the cliff cave in the early morning hours, injected 550 with chelation drugs and hydrating fluids in the nest, and climbed back down. The mother continued caring for the chick between visits. But 550's condition deteriorated. The treatments in the cave were not enough. The team evacuated her to the Los Angeles Zoo.
She recovered. Chelation stripped the lead from her blood and tissues over a course of daily injections. She was raised alongside other young condors at the zoo until August 2011, when she was transferred back to Pinnacles, placed in an outdoor flight pen to reacclimate, and released in late October. She perched in a nearby tree, flew to a feeding site the next day, and was free.
In the years since, 550 left Pinnacles and took up residence on the Big Sur coast. She paired with Condor 652, a male from the Ventana Wildlife Society's program. They nested in 2020 and their first chick fledged but died shortly after. They nested again in 2021 and raised a chick that survived. They have nested every year since. Her father, 318, died in 2012. Her mother, 317, is still alive.
A condor hatched from a substituted egg, raised by foster parents who did not know the difference, poisoned by lead before she could fly, injected with drugs in a cliff cave by humans who climbed to her in the dark, evacuated, treated, returned, released, and now raising her own chicks on the same California coast where condors were nearly erased.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / National Park Service, Pinnacles / Ventana Wildlife Society / Los Angeles Zoo.
