Mark Stratton visits a long-term project to safeguard the world’s largest bird of prey, the Andean condor
Unfurling her three-metre-wingspan’s black and white feathers, Condor Number Five lifts skywards into the cold winds funnelling down the San Pedro Valley. She doesn’t flap her wings once she disappears into the higher Andean peaks. She just glides. Condors have been observed to travel 160 kilometres without resorting to a single wingbeat. It’s little wonder the Incas believed them to be messengers to the gods.
A survey in 2019 revealed that just 150 wild condors remain in the Ecuadorian Andes. I encountered this one at Hacienda Zuleta, where Project Condor Huasi (‘House of the Condor’) is part of a last-ditch national breeding programme to save them from countrywide extirpation. It’s a project that may take another decade to even begin yielding a self-sustaining population. Number Five had been visiting the condors kept in the captive-breeding programme ever since being treated at the project for gunshot wounds.
‘She was tagged here on the hacienda,’ says Frenchman Yann Potoufeu, the lead condor biologist. He explains that the injured bird had been brought to the project back in 2014, where she was patched up and returned to the wild. However, she regularly returns, seemingly fascinated by the captive birds being held in the large enclosures. We watched her as she perched on top of an enclosure in silent communion with the captive condors below.
‘They’re non-verbal, so communicate by body position,’ says Yann, who has worked with Zuleta’s condors for 12 years. ‘They’re very sociable. She visits our captives every few months.’
Andean condors, one of two species of New World vulture – the other is the Californian condor – are the largest flying land bird in the Western Hemisphere and the world’s largest extant bird of prey. They’re found the length of the Andes, but numbers have been seriously depleted, particularly in Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador. They’re currently listed as ‘vulnerable’ by the IUCN.
The main reason behind their decline is poisoning. Carcasses laced with toxins principally aimed at feral dogs to deter livestock attacks cause collateral damage. In 2018, fifteen condors were poisoned in one incident near the Cotopaxi volcano south of Quito. Slow reproduction isn’t helping; these vultures, estimated to live to at least 60, don’t start breeding until around age nine and rear just one chick per year.
Hacienda Zuleta was founded by Jesuits in 1691. It’s located at an altitude of 2,900 metres in the Avenue of Volcanoes within a 1,200-strong Indigenous Andean community called Zuleta, a two-hour drive northeast of Quito. A broad valley of fertile brown soil, planted with purple-flowering potatoes, maize and quinoa, curves steeply to meet towering volcanoes, including the glacier-topped Cayambe (5,790 metres). The hacienda remains a working dairy ranch producing cheese. The meadowland is part of a mosaic of swamp and secondary forest in which spectacled bears roam.
Since 1898, Zuleta’s owners have been the Plaza Lasso family, which included two of Ecuador’s most liberal presidents: Leónidas Plaza (in office 1901–05 and 1912–16), who challenged the church’s primacy in Ecuadorian society and instituted radical land reforms, then Galo Plaza Lasso (1948–52), who returned large tracts of Zuleta estate to its pre-conquistador owners.
The latter’s daughter, Margarita, and her nephew, Fernando Polanco, subsequently converted Zuleta to luxury accommodation and in 1995, created the Galo Plaza Lasso Foundation. This non-profit foundation has fostered significant community projects to improve educational, social and environmental standards.
‘You have to invest in communities and education for conservation to work,’ the foundation’s director, Ximena Pazmiño, tells me. ‘Condors retain bad reputations. At one educational event a child told me his mother said if he didn’t do his homework, a condor would peck out his eyes.’
The Andean condor has a wingspan in excess of three metres. Image: Adobe Stock
Sixty-one-year-old Fernando recalls his uncle and cousin hunting condors. ‘They would kill an old horse and wait for condors to arrive,’ he says. ‘They sometimes counted as many as 30 at one time. My grandfather prohibited hunting around here in the late ’60s.’
He says Condor Huasi’s catalyst was a 1993 BBC documentary, Last Flight of the Condor, filmed around the Antisana volcano, 90 minutes from Quito. ‘It was assumed Antisana had a big condor population, but this was an illusion; the documentary showed no more than 20 individuals,’ he says. He contacted the filmmakers, Friedman and Heide Koster, two biologists living in Quito caring for condors rescued from illegal captivity. ‘We offered them a home for their condors, sponsored by the foundation, and the project was born in 1996.’
Under the Kosters’ initial guidance, Condor Huasi evolved from a rescue haven to a conservation breeding programme. Today, Zuleta is part of a national network of six condor breeding centres, including Quito Zoo, known as Grupo Nacional de Trabajo del Condor Andino. Between them, they currently hold 20 condors, either rescued from illegal captivity and too domesticated to release or captive-reared youngsters. They form the breeding group and individual birds are moved between facilities to match with suitable partners.
From the hacienda, I ride up to Condor Huasi. Yann meets me to introduce their captive population: six condors in three enclosures. Tarishka, a male rescued from illegal captivity in the 1990s, squats on a perch next to his daughter, Huaghcha, born here in November 2022. Huaghcha was separated from her mother, Coya, now in the third enclosure, because the parents fought over parental duties. ‘Normally, they share nesting responsibilities, but they fell out and Coya was injured, so we separated them. But the father proved an excellent single parent,’ says Yann. ‘We will reintroduce them to breed again soon because they were a good couple.’
Coya shares with a male chick called Jatun. Yann will separate a growing chick from its parent before one year. He says the best release age is between one and two years. Jatun’s parents, Inti, a 30-year-old male rescue, and Ayu, captive-reared at Quito Zoo, are in the middle enclosure and are currently nursing an egg. They rotate egg-sitting duties, emerging alternately from their nest’s shelter at the back of the enclosure. In the wild, a parent can spend days seeking carrion for chicks. In captivity, with ready-made meals at hand, usually a slaughtered calf, they rotate nesting duties more frequently. Yann is waiting nervously for the egg to hatch. It has been six weeks since the egg was laid, and generally, chicks emerge after two months.
Jatun, Huaghcha and the new arrival will spend their lives in captivity as breeding stock. In 2016, three young captive-reared condors were rewilded from Zuleta but it proved an unmitigated disaster. ‘One became lost in woodland, presumed dead; the other two became weak so were recaptured.’ Churi had been the first chick Ayu and Inti raised. He was recovered following the release, but he died shortly after from pneumonia.
This failure helped forge a new national strategy. ‘We had to ask what we could’ve done differently. We decided that we were not ready to start releasing as the captive stock is too limited. If we lose released chicks again, we go back to the start. As a result of 2016, we lost a lot of money that could’ve been used building up breeding captives, so we refocused on that,’ Yann says.
He studied successful reintroductions elsewhere, not least the US Fish & Wildlife Service’s Californian condor programme. Just 22 Californian condors remained in the wild in the early 1980s. All of them were captured and put into a breeding programme. By addressing the causes of their decline and creating a robust breeding population, by 2019, the programme’s 1,000th chick was born in the wild. ‘It took the Americans years, so how could we just expect to have a few chicks and release them and hope this would work?’ He said the Americans built up breeding populations of several hundred birds.
Yann won’t commit to how many captive-reared condors they need before they consider releasing. He also says that without tackling the threats to them, it’s pointless to release the birds. They’re rarely hunted now, due to the threat of stiff jail sentences. However, the problem posed by poisoned carcasses put out to control feral dogs remains. Yann explains that Ecuador’s 200,000 feral dogs not only compete for carrion but also help perpetuate the myth that condors kill livestock. ‘The state is not trying to fix this problem and animal-welfare groups are against anyone dealing with the feral dogs,’ he complains.
He takes heart that their education programme is addressing traditionally negative superstitions such as condors being harbingers of death or child abductors. Their La Choza del Condor Interpretation Centre in the San Pedro Valley receives 3,000 visitors a year, including many schoolchildren. I watch him as he dons a pair of fabricated condor wings to demonstrate to a group how large the birds are, drawing awed wows. He then shows a life-sized model of a talon and explains that it’s fused open. ‘It’s impossible for them to pick things up and fly off with lambs or little girls,’ he tells the children.
‘We try to convince people that seeing them is magical and a privilege,’ Ximena says. ‘The message is getting through. The last rescue saw a couple call us about an injured condor. We cared for it and the couple came to the release, and the bird was named after their village, which created a sense of community pride.’ Yann sometimes employs a more direct approach. ‘I ask people what would they prefer as the national symbol on their flag if the condor is lost… a guinea pig?’
Another critical component in future releases will be the maintenance of open mountain spaces in which condors can scavenge – namely the high-altitude páramo. Found across the Andes, above the treeline and below the snowline, páramo is a mountain biome of low shrubby vegetation with mixed grasses that retains rainwater like a natural sponge. It has faced widespread clearance for agriculture in recent decades.
Yet, remarkable conservation work is being carried out locally, rehabilitating 2,378 hectares of páramo now owned and managed by the Zuleta community.
It’s an hour’s bumpy drive along the Ruta Páramo y Biodiversidad from the hacienda in a four-wheel-drive to 4,000 metres with Yann and Renee Recalde, a conservation advocate from the Zuleta community. The track is rough, and we pass alpacas being farmed for their wool.
Zuleta community’s páramo was gifted to the villagers by the Plaza Lasso family in the 1970s. ‘The motivation for this was my grandfather wanted to give the villagers an area to be managed communally. At the time, little was known about conservation, but in 1995, I proposed creating a community reserve to protect its fauna and create capacity to store water,’ explains Fernando. Today, the páramo qualifies for an annual government grant of US$45,000.
Renee regularly sees wild condors up here, often during revegetation work parties. In the mid-1990s there was much opposition from cattle grazers when it came to protecting it. ‘But the community president at the time insisted it should be and forced 300 cows to be removed,’ says Renee. ‘Protecting the páramo watershed gives us power with the government. Future wars will be fought for water not oil.’
We hike through the tussocky páramo to a ridge at 4,000 metres up, binoculars primed. The view along the Andean chain is sensational. Cayambe’s summit pokes through the clouds. Below us is San Pedro, where Condor Huasi is located, and dark cliff-faces streaked with guano, popular with wild condors. ‘I’ve seen breeding pairs here and their chicks. These cliffs are excellent viewpoints for them to spot carcasses,’ says Yann. He feels that this will be an excellent location to release his captive-bred birds. Realistically, he says, condor releases won’t be for another decade. ‘Then we will assess the sustainability of our captive population, its genetic diversity and the reduction of threats. In the short term, if 2024’s survey reveals we have, say, 160 and have not gone backwards, then I will be delighted.’
