California Condors with Tiana Williams-Claussen

Tiana Williams-Claussen  0:00  
for native peoples, I'll speak for the Yurok tribe. But I would say for most native peoples, there's not as much of this dichotomy of the spiritual and physical world, but you don't separate the two. And so condors, for us well, from the biological perspective, and from the Europe perspective, I see them both as kind of an ecological keystone species. So a species that has an inordinate impact on its ecosystem, regardless of its population size, and a cultural keystone species, which is kind of a species that helps drive the cultural narrative of the region.

Michelle Fullner  0:31  
Hello, and welcome to Golden State naturalist, a podcast for anyone who's ever wanted to learn more ways people can have positive impacts on entire ecosystems. I'm Michelle Fullner. And today, we're talking California condors with Tiana Williams Clawson, whose voice you just heard, in this episode, we discussed nine foot wingspans Ice Age megafauna. Why condors almost went extinct in the late 80s, outsized ecological and cultural impacts lead poisoning, and how the Yurok tribe has ensured that these birds that had been absent from far Northern California for over 100 years are once again soaring over the tallest trees in the world. And if you're as in love with California, and its many diverse species and ecosystems as I am, make sure you're following Golden State naturalist in your podcast app so you don't miss the many fascinating episodes coming up this season like seaweed, the Klamath mountains and so many more. I also want to thank everyone supporting Golden State naturalist on Patreon. I delight in making this show. It's an absolute privilege to be able to do so. And patrons of the podcast are the MVPs making it possible for me to pour so much time and so much love into crafting each and every episode. Patrons also get lots of perks like the ability to ask questions to guests bonus audio from interviews and access to the patrons only book club which by the way, is reading gathering moss by Robin wall Kimmerer this month, you can get all of this and also rent a tiny room in my heart for just $4 a month. You can find me on Patreon at www.patreon.com/michelle Fullner. That's Michelle with two L's and Fullner is fu ll en er if you want to see a video I made about thistles or know what my earrings looked like when I hiked to the top of a very steep and very tiny mountain while wearing Birkenstocks recently, you can find me on social media at Golden State naturalist on both Instagram and Tiktok. But now let's get to the episode. Tiana Williams Clawson earned her BA in biochemical science from Harvard University and is currently a master's candidate in Cal Poly Humboldt Department of Wildlife. She's a Yurok tribal member and the director of the Europe tribes wildlife department. So without further ado, let's hear from Tiana Williams Clawson on Golden State naturalist.

I talked with Tiana on a misty April day at the Yurok tribes Condor offices in Humboldt County, but the office building itself is located down a long driveway and behind a locked gate. So Tiana gave me the name of a local convenience store where we could first meet up and Caravan in together. I arrived early, bought a package of peanut m&ms and went back to my car to wait staring up at the sky through car windows liberally smudged by my dog's enthusiastic nose in hopes of catching sight of a soaring Condor. I didn't see one and soon Tiana had arrived to guide me in I followed close behind her up the long driveway through a stand of redwood forest past a marsh and up to the building where we could see a herd of Roosevelt elk grazing nearby, Tiana and I got settled in office chairs, a few black and white Condor tags resting in a nearby windowsill. And I asked her how it was that she came to work with these iconic, critically endangered scavengers find out her story and so much more after a quick break.

Today on Golden State naturalist, we're talking California condors with Tiana Williams Clawson. Here's our conversation from the Yurok Condor offices back in April. I actually wanted to start out by hearing a little bit about your story. I mean, you have a rich background both personally and culturally with condors. And so I'm wondering, can you share your story of how you ended up doing this work with these birds?

Tiana Williams-Claussen  4:57  
I'm always amused by the question of how I ended up with a work because it's one of those life never takes you where you expect stories. But I myself am a Yurok tribal member, I grew up in the Klamath and Crescent City area, my traditional villages with a coil, which is right at the mouth of the Klamath River. So I spent my summers fishing and running along the beach and hanging out with my families and hearing stories from my elders and things like that. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life as a child, but I did know that I wanted to equip myself to come back and serve my tribal community because I had to be at home and I had to be a part of my community. So when I was in high school, I mean, I always love science, I always loved science, I made the determination that I would go to school, and I'd get a science degree. And I'd actually be pre med and go on to be a doctor, because it's really hard to keep doctors in this rural area. I'm like, I'll have a work. I can stay here forever. It'll be great. So I was accepted into quite a few schools, I think probably because people are recognizing the unique story that natives can share. And so that was probably a good talking point for me when I was applying. But so I got it. I got accepted into Harvard, and I got a degree in biochemical sciences. And I got to be a senior taking my MCAT and realized I did not want to be a doctor. So thankfully, the Yurok tribe is very committed to investing in their youth. They provide a summer internship through our an education department, which kind of places young or graduating students into career experience opportunities with the tribe. And I actually got picked up by Dr. Thomas Gates, who was the director of our Office of self governance, which is kind of the State Department for tribes. It helps them coordinate with federal and states and non governmental land managers around them in order to kind of meet tribal objectives, even outside of the reservation boundaries, which are only 10% of our ancestral territories. According to an article by the Trust for Public Land Yurok lands one spanned over a million acres,

Michelle Fullner  7:02  
I'll link this article and a map showing the difference between ancestral territory and current reservation lands. In the show notes.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  7:09  
One of the things that I was privileged to be a part of was helping coordinate what was called our tribal Park Task Force. And the tribal Park task force was a panel of our elders specifically designated to prioritize Natural and Cultural Restoration needs. And they had earlier in 2003, this is 2007 By this point, voted that Paragon ah, the California condor was the single most important landlines species to return to your ancestral territory, it's actually been absent for over a century at that point.

Michelle Fullner  7:39  
So the Yurok name for condor is pre Ganesh, but this made me wonder where the English word for Condor comes from. It's actually derived from the Quechua or inco word for Andean condors couture. Now, the Andean Condor, which is a relative of the California condor was a spiritually significant animal for the Inca who saw the Condor as a messenger to the gods. And according to one and VR article, though, they predominantly identify themselves as Christians, people in the village of Quercy. See, the condor is an Andean God that has come down from the heavens to fight for their freedom. So condors, even though they're different species, on different continents in different cultures have both historic and contemporary spiritual and cultural significance, which I think speaks to how remarkable these birds are. But now let's hear more from Tiana about California condors and their significance to the Yurok tribe. I'm always amused,

Tiana Williams-Claussen  8:33  
when elders told me stories about the beginning of time before humans were even really, you know, the people of the world, because most of the stories are humans were messing things up. And the elder spirits which are the animals or the plants or things like that had to show them how to be. And so this was an instance of that, where the creators are coming together and developing what was known as are what is known as our world renewal ceremonies, our highest of ceremonies, the jumping dance and the white deerskin dance, the boat dance, and the craters are developing this and they're like, We need a prayer. For us. That means a song to help guide the ceremonies. And it was at that time that I've heard the story told two different ways. One, either everybody started singing beautifully and brilliantly because they want their song to be chosen as the prayer. The other way I've heard it told is there was absolute silence is everyone was overwhelmed with this idea, but in either case, prayed on a huge Condor did not sing. He was not a boastful or proud person necessarily. He actually is not known for a singing voice condors do not have a voice box. So they communicate with hisses and grunts and things like that. He was like, I don't have a song. But the creators were able to look into his heart and to His Spirit and see his strength and his knowledge of the world. He actually flies higher than any other bird out there. So he's seen all the world and most importantly, his kind heartedness or generosity, which was a spirit they wanted to bring into this dance. And so they go to him and says, No, I want to hear your song. He's like, All right, I'll do it. And he sings, and sure enough, his hair says, and grandson just a song only a mother could love. But creator, here's the truth behind it. Here's the spirit. And he says, Oh, that was the most beautiful song I've ever heard in my life. Let me sing it back to you. And sure enough, that spirit comes through, and it is the most beautiful and the most powerful song that's ever been sung. And so we continue to sing this song in our high ceremonies, as we pray for the world to be in balance. I actually did not grow up knowing this. Because it had been such a long time since condors had been a part of our world, they were no longer a part of the general conversation, I actually had that conversation with an elder during my time as a young intern, where he was telling me about restoration of one of these world renewal ceremonies, because they were illegal for a very long time. And they had not been practice. But in particular, the white deerskin dance, there was an elder elder, our walk, Lenoir was his name, he was one of the last to have actually danced the way deerskin dance. And so he was there's this drive to revitalize it. And he's brought these elders and other cultural leaders together to help him with this, many, many hearts and hands came into this, and the Elder I'm talking to is saying, our walk old Glen, our walk means his past. So I'm going to start with a condor song, because it's the most important part. And this Elder I'm talking to says, someone who I very much look up to as very knowledgeable, says, I didn't even know that. And so that was really profound to me how close we came to perhaps losing this incredibly significant part of ourselves. Because Condor was no longer on the scene had been driven away. So I didn't grow up knowing this is the point of the story. And so my personal blessing to be a part of this as has definitely driven my life since that point. In any case, the Director of the Office of self governance, Dr. Tom gates, was able to coordinate with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and got a grant through their tribal wildlife grant program to start a feasibility analysis as to whether we could bring condors home because even if we wanted them home, we wanted to make sure it was the right decision for them as well. And so that actually started our wildlife department in 2008. I transferred from my internship to a technician position there very shortly after we hired our senior wildlife biologist, Chris West. And it was just the two of us for quite a while moving Condor restoration forward. And so Chris is actually still with us. He's now the lead of our Condor program for the tribe and the Northern California condor restoration program, which is kind of a joint collaboration between us and Redwood National Parks. And he and I have been a part of growing the wildlife department into something much larger now that helps manage and restore other threatened and endangered species deals with habitat management, integrating cultural and social and economic needs for our forest lands and our prairies and things like that. So that we can move forward and holistic way that meets all of these needs and restores the lands to something closer to what they were pre contact because I've been quite damaged. So now I'm the director of the ark, tribes wildlife department, it's been about 15 years and it's been it's been quite the ride.

Michelle Fullner  13:14  
That is beautiful. As you were telling your story, it really resonated with me the parallels between the near extinction of the Condor and then almost losing the Condor in the traditional stories and in the culture. There's that really close parallel and I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about Condor story and how that near extinction actually came to be what happened.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  13:37  
Yeah, so Condor, California condor was at 1.1 of the most highly endangered birds in the world. While prehistorically they were very adaptive, they actually lived all the way up into what's now Canada down into what's now Mexico across what's now the United States and up into New York. By the mid 1800s. Their range had shrunk significantly westward, still kind of that north to south range, but just barely extending past the Rockies. By the 1950s. Their range had shrunk to a small wishbone area kind of surrounding the central valley in central and southern California. And so as their population dropped precipitously, at one point in the 1980s, there's only 22 individuals left in the world. And there was a very controversial at the time decision made to bring all condors into captivity in the hopes of starting a captive rearing program. And at that point, it was kind of a last ditch measure to save the species. They weren't even entirely clear on what was causing this dramatic decline. But they knew if they didn't do something that condors would wink out of existence. And so thankfully, that ended up actually being very successful. They started breeding in captivity in just the first few years. That program has grown substantively now so that there are wearing and breeding facilities at the Los Angeles Zoo San Diego global San Diego Zoo, the Oregon Zoo and the Boise world center of birds. of prey, which is managed by the Peregrine fund. And so it was successful enough that by the kind of mid 1990s, they started re releasing birds into the wild. And that was very much a learning experience for the Condor recovery program, as we as humans. I mean, we don't necessarily have the innate understanding of what a condor needs without actually watching condors, you know, so they were releasing these birds and learning from as they went. And so we at the Yurok tribe, we started pursuing Condor restoration, as I said, actively in 2008, and became the newest release sites in 2022. This last year, the first new site in 19 years, oh, my goodness. And so we've been really blessed because we have had the opportunity to learn from just these incredible Condor conservationists who have been working towards restoration for decades now and able to bring that knowledge into what we do for our condors. Now, that's amazing. If it makes sense, I can go into kind of the mortality factors. But yeah, that

Michelle Fullner  16:04  
would be great, because I'm curious about kind of historically, what caused their precipitous decline in numbers, and then also kind of still what threatens them today.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  16:13  
So though condors themselves are very adaptable, they'll eat a whole host of different foods, they'll eat inland, they'll eat coastally. They really like those large game animals, or what we consider game animals now like deer and elk, historically, California sea lions and whales, one of the things that probably drove them down in population was the influx of new people in the 1850s from the California gold rush. So not only were there a lot more people to feed, but there's also the introduction of market hunting, which was a different sort of relationship with wildlife than had been managed by the people here previously, the native peoples. And so there's just a major impact on the wildlife that these species relied on. I've been talking about the the near loss of condors, but for example, we almost lost our Roosevelt elk in our area, California sea lion populations were driven to near extinction whale populations the same one of the reasons that they think that they actually survived longest in that kind of southern and central California area is because they learned to be reliant on ranching communities. And the similarly to the large wild game that they previously had relied on. They also relied on the massive salmon runs that our rivers used to support. And of course, they've been on the downward trend since contact as well, there was definitely habitat loss in our particular region. Two major habitat features that support condors in our area are the old growth redwoods, they are cavity nesters, so they don't actually make their own nest, they'll find these large cavities and then lay their eggs within them. So in our area, that means either utilizing the pothole caves, which of course are persistent, or using the old growth redwoods, which either might get burned out in the middle and have a hollow or maybe it's a broken top, and it kind of grows over the top of itself, because they just keep on going to make these cavities. And of course, our Redwood populations are greatly reduced because of the logging industry.

Michelle Fullner  18:02  
If you want to hear more about old growth features and a little bit of a history of the redwood forest, there's an episode on redwood trees with Griff Griffith, which is pretty new and already Beloved. So definitely check that out if you haven't already.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  18:16  
So there's lots of food there was loss of habitats, there was direct killing of the birds. Of course, that is not something that I was taught was okay. In my family has taught me you do not harm condors, one probably because of their spiritual importance, but two, because they actually have really low reproductive rates. They only have one offspring every two years. You

Michelle Fullner  18:37  
heard her right, California condors only lay one egg every other year with a population wants down to 22 individuals in the wild. That was not going to be the ticket to rapid recovery. But thankfully, the folks studying the condors knew a little trick, which is that when condors lose an egg, they will often lay a second one within the same season. A page from the National Park Service describes what happened in the recovery program starting back in the late 80s. To increase the number of eggs laid each year captive breeders would remove eggs as they were laid, prompting the birds to lay a second and sometimes 30 eggs that were removed were incubated and the chicks were reared by hand puppets designed to look like adult condors. And fun fact, I recently got to try on one of those original Condor puppets that actually took care of little baby condors back in the day, I got to try that on it p 22. De la I'll post a picture of that on Instagram soon. So their

Tiana Williams-Claussen  19:27  
population while adoptable and healthy prehistorically are pre contact does well, if they have high mortality, their low reproductive rate just exacerbates them, but people were killing condors directly, either because they loved them or because they feared them. They've got a nine and a half foot wingspan so they're a pretty fearsome bird or they were stealing the eggs there was also lost due to we call it incidental poisoning. But really what it was was people were putting poison carcasses out for carnivores that they didn't like like large cat circles or things like that and condors would incidentally feed on those in Thai. Okay,

Michelle Fullner  20:04  
so I didn't know about these poisoned carcasses until recently when I read a book called coyote America by Dan Flores, which taught me a ton about not only coyotes but also settlers relationship with predators. In general, the whole book is very much worth reading. But to summarize this one aspect of it, settlers saw predators as a threat to their livestock. And as competition for game animals. They failed to understand how predators actually keep ecosystems including game animals healthy, so they would leave out carcasses laced with deadly poisons, like strychnine. This was such a common practice for so long that just about every settler outpost and shop in America sold strychnine for the purpose of killing predators in this way, it's a horrific story. And part of the horror is exactly what Tiana mentioned, which is that not only are these vital and beautiful predators being killed, but that so were loads of other animals that weren't the intended targets of the poison. Okay. But if all of those factors working against the condors after European contact weren't enough, there were more. And we haven't even gotten to the ones that persist today

Tiana Williams-Claussen  21:05  
yet. And there's actually two toxins that are still impacting condors. Today, a lot of these other issues are being addressed their conservation measures or new laws, but the two that remain an issue are actual residual DDT. Wow. And the use of lead ammunition which is introducing toxic lead into the system, and so people are often surprised when they say DDT is still an issue for condors. Of course, now we know it is quite toxic, it causes eggshell thinning. And a whole host of different avian species causes cancer in mammalian species, things like that. And we actually stopped the use of it in the United States in the 1970s. Because of these impacts, but it's also what's known as a persistent organic pollutant. And so it does not degrade quickly at all. It will last for decades upon decades, and even its breakdown metabolites DD D and DD II have the same impacts. And so you have things like the we call it the Montrose chemical spill, but really, it was a monstrous chemical dumping of barrels of DDT into the ocean, which means that our environment still remains highly contaminated with DDT. And so up here, we don't necessarily have those contamination loads. So the reason that DDT is is still a problem for condors is not only that it remains persistent in the environment because other species bird species aren't being impacted as much anymore, but because it's a lipophilic. It's a fat binding molecule, so it bio accumulates in the large blubbery animals like sea lions and seals and whales.

Michelle Fullner  22:37  
Merriam Webster defines bio accumulation as the accumulation over time of a substance and especially a contaminant such as a pesticide or heavy metal in a living organism. So basically, it refers to toxins building up in an animal's body throughout its life.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  22:51  
They themselves may or may not be impacted by it, but it doesn't really go away over time. And so the condors particularly in the Central California flock, which is CO managed by the Ventana Wildlife Society and Pinnacles National Park feed quite a bit on marine resources. And so they have found eggshell thinning to remain a problem for their condors. And so they've done statistics on it. They've done studies, they produced a paper back in 2014. Now, which was saying that about 50% of their eggs were impacted by DDT. Sometimes those eggs can be saved with human intervention, sometimes they can't. But about 50% were impacted. And so one of the feasibility studies that we did was actually looking at whether DDT was going to be a problem in Northern California where we are at because we're right south of the Oregon border. And the way that we did that was by actually taking blubber samples from stranded to dead, basically, California sea lions on our coasts to see if they were contaminated. We don't have a lot of contamination source here. But these are migratory species, which could go to other areas bio accumulate, and if they die on our shores kind of be these DDT bombs. We also collected from whales from seals, any sort of marine mammal that we could, but particularly focusing on California sea lions, because with conservation efforts, they're quite abundant now, and particularly looking at males and adult males, because being adults, they can bioaccumulate the most being males, they don't offload into their young as females actually will do. So it's kind of the worst case scenario is an adult California Sealine. Thankfully, we found that as compared to similar studies that have been done in southern and central California, we had four times lower levels of DDT than central California did. And there's a very clear downward trend as you head south to north, so Oregon's even cleaner than we are, we won't know if DDT is going to be a problem until our birds are actually old enough to start breeding. But I'm very hopeful with Central California kind of being on that cusp of 50% that you can only go up from there, that we're going to be fine in our region. But again, because condors have this low reproduction rate, if you impact the reproduction even More, especially with high mortality rates that remain a problem that's been part of what's kept the population from from growing. So what remains the most impactful contaminant on condors today is actually lead contamination in the environment, which is coming from the use of lead ammunition. And so what happens is lead is the most conventionally used material for ammunition. And particularly, we're talking about large game ammunition rifle ammunition. So for deer and elk and things like that bears, what happens is that lead being such a soft material, it actually fragments into hundreds of pieces upon impact with an animal. And on the one hand, this is actually quite beneficial for the hunter because each of those little bits of lead carries kinetic energy with it, and will quickly and cleanly kill the animal which is what every hunter wants to see. Unfortunately, when those bits of lead get into, say, a gut pile, which most hunters will leave behind, and which normally would be excellent food for a scavenger, a piece of small as a head of a pen is enough to kill a condor. And furthermore, it's enough to kill a bald eagle or golden eagle or a black vulture, all of whom are just as susceptible to lead poisoning as condors arm. And so lead contamination at this point actually accounts for about 50% of mortality in the wild snow, yes, where they know how the bird has died. And every single bird out there is monitored heavily. So there's every effort to to collect every bird that dies to determine what caused that death.

Michelle Fullner  26:26  
Because it had been so long since the interview. I checked in with Tiana last week to see if there were any updates I should include on the Yurok condors and she wrote back that unfortunately, quote, we just had our first lead poisoning event, everybody came through fine but one of our birds Meenu quick or a sixth whose name means I am bashful or shy did have an elevated enough blood level to merit chelation treatment, which was conducted in coordination with our partners at Sequoia Park Zoo and Oakland Zoo. He seems in good spirits and is out of treatment. But under observation in our release and management facility, she also sent me a post from the Yurok tribes Facebook account that goes into more detail about the poisoning event. The post notes that five out of the eight free flying condors in the region were exposed to lead when they fed on a poacher killed elk within Redwood National Park in the Bald Hills. I'll link that post in the show notes in case you want to read more about it and see photos of me new Quick undergoing treatment. And

Tiana Williams-Claussen  27:19  
so they've actually done the statistics. And they have found, at least in modeling that if we are able to beat this lead issue by transitioning to non lead alternatives, we may actually be able to stop managing condors because all of the other mortality factors combined are insignificant enough in terms of numbers that they could rise on their own. Oh, my goodness,

Michelle Fullner  27:40  
and is lead ammunition still sold in the state of California, let

Tiana Williams-Claussen  27:44  
ammunition is still sold in the state of California. The state did ban its use for all hunting in 2019 largely on a campaign of saving the California condors. Which, as a condor biologist, I've got kind of mixed feelings about because I mean, I live in Del Norte County, I have to admit I'm a little bit conservative when it comes to gun rights, because we're hunters and Katherine's up here in California tends to be a little bit hot, heavy on the gun regulation. And so we were concerned in our program that if this ban of lead ammunition was put in terms of saving the condors that it would set condors and hunters up as enemies. Oh, sure, yeah. Which is not true. A lot of the work that we do talking about the impacts of lead ammunition encouraging people to voluntarily switch to non lead ammunition is premised on the very strong conservation ethic that many hunters carry, because they are the people who want to be out in the wild, who want this full and beautiful ecosystem who don't want to have unintended impacts.

Michelle Fullner  28:48  
So I've never gone hunting as an adult. But I was raised in a family of deer hunters. Some of my earliest memories are of getting up before dawn and driving way out into the hills east of Napa Valley squeezed into a pickup truck or an old Jeep with my dad, sometimes my 80 plus year old great grandpa and my brother, we would get there as soon as it was laid out and legal to hunt, and my dad would constantly have to remind me to walk quietly as I crunched along on oak leaves and fallen twigs, and it might seem ironic to some people, but I learned conservation from my dad while hunting. He taught my brother and I to respect the animals to use every part of an animal to detest poachers and Trophy Hunters. When my dad had a successful hunt. Usually when I wasn't present, my brother and I would help him make venison jerky, one of my favorite foods as a child in our little tin smokers. I know that hunting is a difficult and nuanced topic. I know it isn't one dimensional and can be done in ways that are incredibly problematic. But I do think there's a way to hunt that is both respectful and ecologically beneficial. And that can actually help people connect more deeply with the natural world and want to protect it. I don't have anything lined up right now. I think an episode exploring the ethics of hunting could be really interesting and thought provoking. Let me know whether or not you'd want to hear that episode. Okay. And Tiana will talk a little bit more about hunting and hunters as conservationists in a moment, but she was just discussing lead ammunitions impact on condors, and was about to comment on the approach of banning lead ammunition for hunting.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  30:20  
And so this approach, kind of, we have a program called the hunters of stewards, which takes that approach exactly where we're reaching out to hunters, letting them know about the issues and inviting them to be partners and conservation and having very good results from that. But a lot of doors that have been open from our work there when the ban went into place, unfortunately, kind of got slammed in our face at that time. And that's that's lessened at this point, it was kind of an initial reaction. I do think that a lot more outreach needed to be done to the hunting community before the ban went into place in order to bring them along voluntarily into this. But you can still buy lead ammunition, you can use it for your sighting in and for your practice. And for all that, unfortunately, the lead ban has not yet proven to be effective. And there's probably a few reasons for that. One is what's known as legacy lead, basically, an animal gets shot but isn't killed, it runs off and carries that lead. And so it's still out there in the environments. Another is just the difficulty right now, in basically finding any ammunition, there has been a huge run on ammunition because of COVID, and changes in politics, and just all these things that stress people out. And so it's hard to find anything on the shelves these days, let alone non lead ammunition specifically. And so for people who remain unconvinced, if they don't understand the reasons why it's just as easy to use the lead that they've got stockpiled as the non lead, and it's not easy to enforce the law, because if you're looking at around lead ammunition versus non lead ammunition, they look largely the same in most cases. And the only way to tell if it's lead or non lead is to actually break the round open, which no law enforcement officer wants to do, understandably. And so for people who don't know the reasons why or haven't been adequately convinced they're still using lead. And so there's a lot of talk not only in condo recovery, but in Eagle recovery and things like that about how do we continue to get the word out there? How do we more effectively get the word out there to convince people? How do we increase non lead ammunition stocks out there so that people who want to make this transition can make the transition? Again, trying to take this multi Vaillant approach to helping us transition away from lead ammunition to non lead ammunition is showing

Michelle Fullner  32:42  
those hunters that you care about their concerns as well. I mean, that builds a lot of trust between communities. Right? It

Tiana Williams-Claussen  32:48  
does. I mean, we I think a really strong point for the Yurok people in this is that we are a hunting society, we have been since time immemorial, we understand that one of the truest ways you can engage with the meat that you eat is to harvest it so that you understand what it really means to take a life. And so there's a lot of people in our community who still rely actively on hunting to feed their families. And we've got that, that strength when we talk to the hunting community. I mean, myself, I, I am a hunter, I come from a hunting community. And most of our staff on our crew are hunters as well. But all of course convinced of the need to transition to non lead. So we can speak authoritative ly not only for the need, but the fact that it works, because we've all harvested game with it.

Michelle Fullner  33:30  
It's not this kind of top down approach of like we hear over here in the academy, or exact exactly as much more experiential.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  33:40  
And that's the really neat thing about the hunting community is it is a community. It's something that is passed on to through generations. It's something that brothers or sisters share, it's the sort of thing that you can go sit at the bar and talk about with your friends and things like that. And so every individual that we convince us as a need for then serves as an ambassador to somebody else. And so we've taken several different approaches at just getting the word out to as many people as we can. And we're not the only people doing this. I mean, this is rampant throughout the California condor recovery program. And we're learning a ton from the folks who have been doing it for years, but uh, reaching out to as many of the community as we can reaching out to what you might call authority figures in the community, whether that's like the hunting conservation groups or ammunition shop owners and things like that, making sure that they're clear so that when folks come in and ask questions about things, not only are they convinced, but they can speak knowledgeably about making this transition, we do really want to support continued hunting, we do think it's an important role that humans play. And so we actually also provide hunter safety certification courses in California so that young hunters can get the certification they need to hunt but then are also provided from day one with this information about non lead ammunition and its efficacy before they're kind of ingrained with other conventions like using lead ammunition so they've got the information right from the Get go.

Michelle Fullner  35:00  
That's great.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  35:01  
I love it personally, because I'm both as the director and a tribal member, I do a lot of our youth outreach. And so I've been doing this for over a decade now. And I always, particularly when talking to our tribal community, which is still very reliant on on hunted game, include this information about LED. And in the last few years, last couple of years in particular, I've been really happy I go, and I talk to our youth and I start talking about condors, and how great they are and the issues that still facing them. And I bring up lead ammunition and almost inevitably, a child will pop up and say, Oh, my grandpa uses non lead or my dad uses non lead, or the kid himself will stand up and start telling me about lead and non lead. And he's an ambassador to his friends as well. So really powerful. I think it's just a matter of time until we beat this.

Michelle Fullner  35:47  
That's fantastic. That's really good news. And I had a listener question while we're still kind of on the subject of of what's threatening Condor sounds like let is the big one. But a listener was wondering about wind. And if you're wondering if you know of any wind energy projects coming to the area, is that something that you're concerned about? That listener question was from patron and friend of the pod? Cliff, Holly, when

Tiana Williams-Claussen  36:09  
it comes to wind, it's definitely a contentious issue, because we all want to move towards greener energy. But it has to be done in a good way. And unfortunately, both wind turbines and condors really like wind. And so this is more of an issue in central and southern California, where there's a lot of wind energy, that's, that's being involved. And honestly, you'd be better off to speak to some of those folks about the partnerships and trials and tribulations there. But in particular, in our region, for example, there had been a strong drive to put in a wind energy farm along what's called bear rich one. So that's a little bit south of us. It's in one country, and you're Petrolia. And it's just one of those areas, you can just see Condor sweeping along that ridge line. And it was it was, man, I'm gonna keep using the word complicated. But it was a complicated issue, not only because of condors, which actually weren't here yet. We're still in the kind of environmental review process at that time. But because that ridge is a very sacred area for the tribe down there for the we all people. And while wind energy, green energy is the way to go, it would have absolutely obliterated the landscape. And so from the Europe perspective, or at least from the Condor programs perspective, our first priority was yes, let's talk about condors. But first, let's talk about the way out people and preserving their their sacred sites. And it was it was kind of a ultimately it didn't happen. It was kind of a victory for the little men in this particular case, because we had been getting rumblings from up above, this is going to happen, wow. Regardless of what the tribal people are saying, here, this is going to happen. We need to invest in the wind in this area. But it came down to the county supervisors who were more directly in relationship with it. We are people who said no, we're not going to allow the destruction of their sacred sites. That's great. And it didn't move forward. So that said, there's a lot more interest up here in northern California right now. And actually ocean wind, which is, of course, also a very complicated subject. But there is currently a lease out right now to start doing exploratory research for an area off of a more like the Trinidad head area I'm in in Humboldt County. So it's kind of on the southern edge of Europe country where we meet we are country. And that comes with a whole host of questions. What does that mean for marine life? What does that mean for like benthic feeders? What does that mean for you know, migratory birds, and then marbled murrelet, and things like that. And so we're working on actually developing a marine department, which we don't yet have to help answer these questions as we move along. But they're proposing that they be about 20 miles out, and condors do not fly over the ocean. So for condors, at least, this is unlikely, or at least the wind turbines themselves are unlikely to be a potential impact. My concern is how they run the transmission lines, because power lines have been a problem for condors. In the past, one of our feasibility analyses was actually working with our local utility companies to say, Well, where are your power lines? Are they going to be a problem for condors? And right off the bat determined? No, they're not because of the way that they use the landscape. condors will move around them, not through them. Okay, great. I don't know what that will mean when we're putting new transmission lines in though. So we need to be in constant communication with whoever ends up actually developing wind here, if it happens to make sure that it's done in a way that doesn't harm the species. I mean, hopefully, it'll be less of an issue that has historically been there's been quite a few condors lost power lines, the condo recovery program learned a really neat trick actually of putting fake power lines in their rearing facilities in and around their release facilities. And they provide just a little bit of a jolt, not enough to hurt but enough to be like, for a condor to land on it. And so historically, part of the problem has been them landing on these really Beautiful birches and then extending their nine foot wingspan to both sides of the line and getting electrocuted. So not only do they not do that anymore, but also they tend to just avoid them in general, which reduces like collisions and things like that. So, I mean, hopefully it won't be an issue. Powerline interactions have been greatly reduced since then. But like I said, we're going to be right there the whole way to make sure that things are done. Well. Nice.

Michelle Fullner  40:24  
I love that. And you we talked a little bit, I want to get kind of a little bit more into condors, themselves, their lifecycle, all of that. And you talked a little bit about their lifecycle and saying that it takes every two years one shake, right, but I'm just kind of wondering more about their lives, like how, how long do condors live actually, so

Tiana Williams-Claussen  40:44  
condors actually will live we don't quite know how long condors will level start with that, but they are very long lived species. I believe the oldest California condor right now is 56 years old. Wow. And we know that they're near cousin, the Andean Condor, at least in captivity can live as much as 80 years. So we'd expect someplace in between there for a California condor. They don't actually start breeding until they're about six to eight years old. Wow. So there's quite a bit of an investment in growing a reproductive population, but then they invest in being very good parents, both the male and the female, they form life life mates, basically life bonds, and they will have one egg every two years. So it takes about 56 to 58 days to incubate that egg, both the mom and the dad will will contribute to that. And then they don't fledge. until about six months old, you gotta grow into a nine and a half foot wingspan, but they'll actually stay with their parents for the rest of that two year cycle. And once they fledge, they will follow their parents around learning how to navigate the landscape, learning how to fly effectively learning where all the good and good resources are, whether it's water or food, how to get home, at which points after the end of that two year cycle. I always laugh when I think about this. Our condo program manager, Chris says that basically the parents just kind of he describes it as just kind of dropping them off with other juveniles, because they're still juveniles at this point. And then they kind of form their own little clique. Wow, I always picture that as like a roving pack of teenagers going across the landscape. They're not necessarily the wisest at that point, but they're very interested. And they're very social birds. They're very smart birds, they will actually learn from each other at that point, because they each bring knowledge of what their parents had taught them. And so in this way, this very social, very flocking species, learned the whole of the landscape and learns to be better adapted to it. That's incredible. They're amazing birds. I absolutely love them.

Michelle Fullner  42:36  
They seem very cool. Do you find them beautiful?

Tiana Williams-Claussen  42:39  
I find them absolutely beautiful. I really do. If anyone's ever privileged to go online and see the picture of a chick. I mean, when they're fresh born, they're like any, any of the more naked type chicks, they're just. But they very quickly become these little adorable fluffy balls, that are just the cutest things. as they age, they go through their awkward, ungainly stages, we all do. And by the time they reach that kind of juvenile often their own stage, they've got these beautiful black pristine feathers, their heads are all black and shiny. Each of their feathers is outlined with this, like really clear and beautiful kind of Buffy edging that just delineates each wing. And of course, in flights, they are beyond description. I remember the first time that I really saw Condor up close and personal was actually at the Ventana Wildlife Society. And they tend to hang out around the release management, release and management sites because they're actively being managed there. There's food put out, there's water and things like that for various reasons. But one flew maybe 10 feet over my head at the time. And there was just this zing as the wind press through his feathers. And it just sounded like it was singing to me. And it was the most incredible thing. Of course, as they get older, they do lose all that that pretty black feathering and they they become bald, which of course is a an adaptation to the fact that they're scavengers. Okay, let's go I was gonna ask about Yeah, when they're feeding, they've got very tough stomachs. They're actually very clean birds, they bathe quite a bit. But having that bald head allows them to really get into the good stuff inside of a body cavity and then come out relatively clean relatively uncontaminated by disease. But even that bald headed look is really amazing to me, because as they get older, they will actually become brighter. They'll get yellow and red hues and orange hues which they can use to communicate with each other as well. They're definitely a society that's got hierarchy. The older the bigger the bird is kind of more more top of the game and things like that. That's probably part of the reason the younglings have blackheads because they're, they don't want to get oh kid on the bad side of a more dominant bird. But you can watch these older birds and how they interact with each other and flush up and things like that. And I just I think they're beautiful. I think they're amazing.

Michelle Fullner  44:50  
That's fantastic. I think one of the prettiest things for me, and I've never seen one in person but seeing their wingspan open and in that wedge the way wedge under the wingspan is just beautiful marking.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  45:03  
Yes, that white wedge you're talking about is absolutely gorgeous because they've got a very dark, dark brown and black feather over most of their body, but they've got this beautiful pristine white wedge on the leading forefront of their wings. And so I guess I was taught that you don't harm a condor, but we do use their feathers in our regalia that they dropped. Those are actually particularly prized and the wiper, yes, because they're, they're harder to find pristine, but then they're just so beautiful as well. And for anybody who hasn't seen a condor, we often talk about that particular wedge as being the way to differentiate between a condor and a turkey vulture. We got a lot of calls when we first release birds of condors because people were so excited they wanted to see condors, but more often than not, it was a turkey vulture. And the way that you can tell the difference there is the white on a condor is on that leading edge of the wing, whereas on a turkey vulture it's on the trailing edge of their wings. So if you look up and it's on the trailing edge, it's a turkey Wiltshire fits on the front edge, it's probably a condor, okay.

Michelle Fullner  45:58  
And then the size difference, the size difference that might be hard at a distance

Tiana Williams-Claussen  46:03  
at a distance, it can be hard to see the size difference between a condor and a turkey vultures, you will often see them flying together. Oh, but and so in that case, you can usually see the difference. But if you're just looking at a bird flying in the air, it can be hard. One way to tell a turkey picture from a condor in flight is the condor has is very much a soaring bird being so large nine and a half foot wingspan, 25 pounds. I'm not sure if I mentioned they're actually the largest land base bird in North America. They have they're very reliant on soaring and they have a very steady sort of solar. They actually did a study on Andean condors where they put a little backpack on a condor and saw that it flew its sword 100 miles before it took a flap of its wings. Right? Yeah. 100 100 miles that is

Michelle Fullner  46:45  
so efficient. It

Tiana Williams-Claussen  46:46  
is it is incredibly. Turkey vultures, on the other hand, being smaller can take a different sort of advantage over the winds. So a lot of times one, they've got kind of that V shaped extension to their wings, it's less flat, it's more V shaped, but you'll also see them be kind of like, tippy, okay, you know, and that's because they're taking advantage of smaller winds that condors can and using them to get the lift that they need. So that's one of the most telltale things if you're looking on the sky. Okay.

Michelle Fullner  47:11  
So big soaring airplane is the condor. Exactly. Okay. Great. Okay. I mean, this question, I don't know if there's an answer to this question. Maybe if you kind of dig back into their evolutionary history, but just like we keep talking about they're nine and a half foot wingspan, and they're so large, but why are they so large? Like, what was the advantage for them of getting that big, when so many birds are, you know, had a strategy of being much smaller? Why

Tiana Williams-Claussen  47:37  
are condors so large? I think that is a really good question. I personally don't know that I have a definitive answer, but I'll posit this great. I happen to have gone to the lib red carpets last week. So

Michelle Fullner  47:49  
I'm super cool. You know, I did a libreria episode. Funny story about that episode, I recorded the intro and a whole bunch of asides, and it was not until I was about ready to publish the episode, then I realized that I had talked super fast in parts of it. So then I overcompensated and talked super slow in the outro. I don't know if you take an average, it's probably all just about the right pace. I needed a metronome.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  48:14  
But it reminded me of the even larger condors that used to exist behind times when there used to be a condo or at least a condo relative that had a 20 foot wingspan back in the day. So in reality, they did start getting smaller, as the MegaFon has started getting smaller, and they needed to take advantage of a larger variety of foods and things like that. So some people will still call condors dinosaurs, because they haven't changed in the last 20,000 years or so. But they did actually take that that approach of getting smaller as other birds did. They just didn't take it so far. Okay,

Michelle Fullner  48:47  
so they were potentially feasting on the megafauna of the Ice Age,

Tiana Williams-Claussen  48:52  
exactly. Midsummer, like it made sense for them to be so big. There's all of

Michelle Fullner  48:57  
this big, abundant food and going around that

Tiana Williams-Claussen  48:59  
claim. And they do fill the somewhat interesting ecological niche here of being the largest of the of the obligate scavengers, that the scavengers that only eat dead things. The next largest is our turkey vulture. But they're only they quote, unquote, only got a wingspan of about six and a half feet and are much smaller and lighter. They do not have the strength and capacity to get through the really thick hides of the megafauna of the elk and the bears and the California sea lions. So California condors actually filled that niche of being able to break into these animals with their powerful bills, not only feeding themselves, but also opening these foods to other scavengers who might otherwise not be able to access them. So that's probably part of what contributes to their their continued size.

Michelle Fullner  49:45  
So their presence is creating a greater food source to support multiple species. Exactly. That's cool condors I love that and we talked a little earlier too about their cultural significance, but I just wanted to know if you wanted to say anything else about I think you kind of got into it. You told the story, but just wanted to give you the opportunity. Well,

Tiana Williams-Claussen  50:04  
one thing that I really love about condors, and I don't know that it's an exclusively native thing, or Northern California thing. I mean, on the one hand, they are culturally significant to tribes all the way throughout the Pacific Northwest all the way throughout California, in different ways. I mean, for most of the tribes in this region, it's his relationship to that world renewal ethic. But in other areas, he was he or she perhaps was considered as a progenitor or someone who provided food often associated with him things like whales that washed up, you could go and follow the condors, and all that sort of stuff to find them. Other times, maybe kind of a bad mama jamma, who didn't want to cross and things like that, but always very culturally important. But from the more recent history, I think that they are just incredibly culturally important because of what they represent to the conservation community. They're actually one of the first species they were one of the first species to be on the Endangered Species Act list, they actually had their own protections even prior to that there's consideration that condors might actually be, you know, the national bird versus Eagle, not everybody knows that. But having had such a dramatic comeback story, even if they aren't out of the woods yet, they are hope that we can save the world. Basically, the other thing about condors is that they bring together this incredible diversity of people. I mean, you've got tribes, you've got federal government, state governments, you've got the citizen scientists who love them and just in love to see them out on the landscape. You've got the hunting community, the ranching community, all of these different people from all of these different walks of life coming together to assure the success of the species, which anytime you talk to somebody who's seen a condor, the words that they use magnificent, wonderful, incredible, indescribable mood because he touches our hearts, every one of us. I like that. There's kind of this crossover I mean for for native peoples all speak for the Yurok tribe. But I would say for most native peoples, there's not as much of this dichotomy of the spiritual and physical world where you don't separate the two. And so condors, for us well, from the biological perspective, and from the Yurok perspective, I see them both as kind of an ecological keystone species, so a species that has an inordinate impact on its ecosystem, regardless of its population size, and a cultural keystone species, which is kind of a species that helps drive the cultural narrative of the region. And so you can see that with like the Yurok people in all our surrounding tribes, because he's so important to our foundational reason for being as world renewal people, but I think he serves that same function for so many others because of what he means for conservation, and doing good for the world. And so not only his the is important as a scavenger, he's important as a cultural icon. He's important because he has an inordinate impact on us as humans, who then of course, we impact everything that we touch, we're influenced by condors, and we are influenced to make the world better. I would say if you have a good and healthy world for condors, you've got a good and healthy world for everybody else, because they're this Apex species. So there's just all this kind of cultural and ecological mixing that condors represent for me. The last, I'd say really important cultural aspect to him for me is, I mean, it's meant a lot to our Europe, people, that condor has come home, we've been talking about it for a very long time. When we first brought them home, march 25. The first Condor arrived three days later, we had four more, we were able to bring some of the members of the original tribal Park Task Force who had made that decision up to the Condor site to meet the birds also, were able to bring other ceremonial leaders who, who knew how important it was to have condors. And so I'm talking to these folks who, again, they're people that I very much admire and love and look up to, and I'm doing it for them. I'm grieving a little bit, because there were a lot, we've lost quite a few of that original panel in the 15 years that we've been working towards those. But so here, I am so happy to like, condors are home I'm so happy you guys get to meet each other. And they're coming up to me and some of them are crying and giving me hugs and just being so grateful to me. And of course, our crew for actually making this happen. And it was a complete role reversal from what I was not necessarily expecting or not expecting, but just the fact that I was so grateful to them, and they were so grateful to me was really moving to me and really impactful. It also represents I'm not sure what the right word is re acquisition, re recognition, I'm not sure. But basically a recognition of that inherent tribal sovereignty as caretakers and stewards of the system not overlords, not hierarchically above, but important in our own role within the ecosystem as caretakers of the system that was taken away from us as tribal people with contact as we were forced onto the reservation as our populations were reduced as it was illegal in a lot of ways to be native. So us being able to lead the charge on this and kind of retake that stewardship role in In such a public way, I think is really important not only for us, but for other tribes out there who are working to do just exactly the same thing, some with just as much success on without as much excess success depending on the situation that they're in. And so one of the things that I've been really called to do by a lot of people wanting to talk to me or presentations that people want to give or or being a part of panels and things like that with federal and state governments is representing the ways that tribal people can be in are unnecessary part of the solution describing co management successes so that we can move forward together in a good way. And obviously, we're not the only people doing this, but the fact that we can contribute to these conversations and say, this is possible, I think, has been a really powerful thing for my role. I love that so much. Do

Michelle Fullner  55:45  
you think have you noticed there being a greater public awareness of the role of tribes in this kind of revitalization of ecosystems? Like is that is there a grown growing awareness among the general public?

Tiana Williams-Claussen  55:58  
I do think there's a growing awareness of the role of tribes and the continued existence of tribes, even really, amongst the general population, because of projects like this, I know that a lot of people who express support for our work are particularly moved or impacted by the fact that it's a tribal people who are doing this and I, I mean, not to be, I guess, not to be strategic or mercenary about it. But I, I feel like that draw brings a lot of people who have who have interest in telling the story, it brings people to us, and then we can share this story because it is something that's pretty unique. And so we've had, you know, talking to folks like yourself, or the Washington Post or the LA Times because of NPR, because it's such this unique story. It's, it's a little bit funny to me, particularly, we were on NPR shortwave, and then they picked it up again, for all things considered, this isn't a big movement or amazing thing or anything, but people I had not heard from from yours, were texting me and calling me after those because they're like, that sounds like Tiana's scribe. And they're like, that sounds like Tia. And so they're calling me. And even though that's like a little microcosm, that says to me that there's just a whole world out there being reached by these sorts of things. So making people aware of what's going on.

Michelle Fullner  57:12  
Right on, that's fantastic. Oh, let's give people the live feed information. So there is a live feed, I've looked a couple of times, and I haven't seen the bird's eye just kind of popped in. So So you have to kind of catch him at the right time.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  57:26  
So I mean, to preface we do have a live feed. If you Google the Yurok Condor cam, you can find it otherwise, you can go to our website, which is Yurok tribe slash wildlife, and you can find it there and it is on normally 24/7, we did have some problems with all the heavy snows with our connection, but we just got it reconnected, actually, the birds are actually there quite a bit. The best times to see them are probably a little bit in the morning, about nine or 10 o'clock they started stirring around, they'll often land on the facility because that's where it's placed is actually at the facility continues to be an active management site to be on the facility or there will be down at the carcass as we provide them or down the water hole that we provide them for washing and for, for drinking, we clean it out regularly. A lot of times we have somebody who's actually monitoring the can because we use it for our own observations of the birds. And so if they're up in the trees, you'll see someone pan up to try and find where they are. And I've I love the Condor cam, I'll just keep it on my second monitor these guys, but one of the things I really loved about it, too is not only their people either drawn there because of the condors themselves, or because of the Europe people in that story. But even people who maybe weren't vulture enthusiasts, but were somehow drawn to the story or like, yeah, it wasn't so sure about this bull drew thing and dead carcasses, and it just seemed really gross. But within a week or two, they're like, Yeah, I wasn't sure. But this is amazing. It's so wonderful watching this like natural thing and the personalities of the birds. And so not only do we use it as a as kind of a scientific tool for monitoring them, but it's a cultural kind of outreach tool. And then it introduces a lot of citizen science for us, as well as people who are watching all the time, call us and say oh, did you notice this? Oh, and then they give us calls and and tell us about it. So it's been a really amazing tool. Yeah, I

Michelle Fullner  59:12  
noticed that there's a pretty vibrant community. There. Yeah, like, you know, Condor. 3:23pm You know, I was like, oh, man, that was like 10 minutes ago. I missed it.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  59:21  
I love it. And of course, we're super enthusiastic about the other birds that come in not only ravens and turkey vultures are pretty common, but we've got some juvenile and golden and and bald eagles who come in and watching the interactions between these, these birds and stuff.

Michelle Fullner  59:35  
So are these condors that are on the Condor camp, the ones that have not yet been released? All of

Tiana Williams-Claussen  59:40  
the birds we currently have out right now have been released. So we received I mentioned our first cohort in March of last year. This included an adult mentor bird who actually is unfortunately unbelievable, but who being an adult is kind of like the top of the hierarchy for these birds. So they're actually introduced together into our release and management facility so they can kind of be finished off almost, he kind of taught them the last bits about what it is to establish social norms, good behaviors, healthy behaviors, to recognize that dominance hierarchy as well. And then also ultimately acting kind of as a kind of a social lure for the birds that were released, because they recognized him as the dominant bird. And I always wanted to come back. And well, ultimately, of course, we want the birds to expand across the landscape, all of the birds that we have come from the breeding and rearing facility. So this is actually the first time they've ever been out in the wild. It's particularly important for this first cohort that they stick close to home at least for a while, so that we can really keep a good eye on them. They've never flown, they've never learned how to find their own resources, and they don't have an existing flock to integrate with, to learn from. And so at least for this first year, we really wanted to keep them closer to home so that we could make sure that they were well adopting before they moved out. But so we released the first of our birds in early May of 2022, we actually released two at the same time, if anybody's around, you can look up and see a three and a two nicknamed point with sun and Nesquik chalk, which means basically a leader and also one who kind of returns isn't both names given to them as the first birds who who released in our area, but they're all all four of those birds are free flying, it was three males and one female. We also received a second cohort in August of last year and they were fully released by November of last year. So we have eight birds free flying right now and expect our next cohort to arrive probably sometime in the summer. They're allowed to acclimate for about a month as two months before they're released as well. So hopefully by the end of this year, we should have at least 12 birds. Okay,

Michelle Fullner  1:01:42  
I've got more Condor updates for you in this part is really good news. This is from an email from Tiana she says we have three new birds since the interview who came to us from the LA Zoo, none of which have been released into the wild yet they're acclimating to our region in our release and management facility right now to females and one male B zero, b two and b one respectively. We aim to release them in November, they've been vaccinated against highly pathogenic avian influenza, and they don't yet have Yurok nicknames. So the Yurok tribe is going to be announcing that soon. Or maybe they've already announced it by the time you're listening to this. So head on over to the Yurok tribe Facebook page to see a post about the new birds, right and have you been able to see them just when you're out and about living your life? Have you seen them I

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:02:26  
not so much, they really are sticking close to home. Providing carcasses still remains an important part of Condor management in our case, because we have such young birds particularly, but to it just makes sure they've got a nice clean carcass that's not contaminated with bad things. So they come back and stick pretty close to home right now, especially with us how harsh the winter has been this year. So they're just kind of home buddies who are very fat and happy. Resources, they have flown about 32 miles from the release site. They've been to the Klamath or they've been down to highway 299. South of us they've been to the coast. So they've done their exploring, but they've been pretty close. Yeah, because of all the rain in the snow we've been having. So they're

Michelle Fullner  1:03:05  
tagged and are they also tracked is there like GPS on them. Okay,

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:03:09  
so all the birds carry both a satellite transmitter, which pings I think every hour or something like that, and kind of gives us an overall sense of how they're utilizing the landscape. They also all carry radio or VHF tags so that our crew can actually go out in the field and pinpoint where they are. lay eyes on the bird and make sure that they're healthy. And well, if they weren't, then we know we have to do some sort of intervention. But so far everybody's been pretty well off. Right?

Michelle Fullner  1:03:34  
And this is maybe more speaking to the central and southern California birds, as they have started to reproduce in the wild because you're too young to have done that yet. Do they continue tagging those young birds? Are all condors tagged still, this question was actually a listener question from Patreon from Janet G.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:03:50  
All condors at this point, there's the aim to at least get them the visual tag because they all carry a visual tag with their number which which correlates with which bird that they are. So you can look up and say oh, that so and so historically, all birds were tagged with the satellite and or VHF tags and all of our birds are going to be but in southern and central California. And there's also the wonderful flock and Arizona populations have expanded too far for that to really be feasible. And so they get as many out there as they can. They certainly want to capture all young birds and to get those wing tags on. They also take blood to check their health and things like that confirm that mom and dad are who they think they are. Because just with humans, sometimes that's not quite who you expect him to be that sort of thing. But no, they're actually relying in part on flock dynamics because they're so social, so and so always hangs out with so and so you know if so and so is doing okay, we'll probably find their friend there as well.

Michelle Fullner  1:04:45  
Gotcha. Nice. What are your hopes for the future going forward with this project? What do you hope to see it become? Well,

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:04:52  
from a practical standpoint, we're going to continue to release birds at least for annually, but I think that's really just the beginning. I mean, my hope It's honestly our for the successful end of this project, that we come to a point where we no longer have to be tagging and managing birds. And they're just free flying, doing as nature had intended. I've always got this secret little hope that as I'm I'm driving along the mountain ways are the river ways that I'm just going to look up and there's going to be a condor. And certainly they're going to start expanding. And we're going to see that sooner rather than later. But by the time I'm ready to retire, hopefully, hopefully, we've worked ourselves out of a job in this respect.

Michelle Fullner  1:05:31  
That would be fantastic. Yes. And we

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:05:35  
hope that this is just the start of things for the Pacific Northwest, we're hoping that they'll expand up into Oregon and Washington that they'll expand across the across California and into the Sierras. And eventually, at some point, they're going to meet up with the other California condor flocks. But that's probably quite a ways down the road. Now,

Michelle Fullner  1:05:50  
it'd be great. It'd be great. Two more questions for you. One. Any just anything else you want to make sure people know about condors? Or any myths, you want to dispel?

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:06:01  
The only myth that I might think to expel I don't think it's as common as it used to be. But I've still talked to people that as soon as I started describing condors to them, they're like, Wow,

Speaker 3  1:06:09  
they're huge. Do I like need to be worried they're gonna run off with my little dog.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:06:15  
And no, you don't need to be worried about that. They are obligate scavengers, they're not aggressive. We have seen them sit there for weeks looking at a carcass as Christmas joke, just to make sure it's really, really dead. Oh, boy, they

Michelle Fullner  1:06:27  
go down.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:06:28  
They are very smart. They're very curious. I think probably quite a few people saw on the news where they had they had landed on that lady's porch, and they started picking it all these things and being a little bit destructive, that is kind of the nature of condors, or scavengers, because they are curious. And at that point, the the powers that be kind of released, well, you can gently haze them away. You know, most most instances, you want to leave a bird entirely alone, you don't want to accidentally flush it into a dangerous situation. You know, if you're in the middle of nowhere, and they're on your porch, you can probably go Shoo, shoo, and it'll be fine. But they really are a non aggressive bird. They really are incredible and amazing. And if you have the opportunity to get to know them, I absolutely encourage anybody to pursue that opportunity. Great.

Michelle Fullner  1:07:12  
And last question is just, what about these birds still takes your breath away.

Tiana Williams-Claussen  1:07:18  
In terms of taking my breath away. I think I keep going back to that first moment when we released our first two birds. As managers we had we had set the stage we put a carcass out there for them to look at and be interested in. We waited for a time when the turkey vultures were feeding so that the condors would like hopefully just hop out and start feeding as a part of the the avian scavenger cohort. But our birds were not having it. They immediately took off and flew into the distance. As I said, they're there from the captive breeding programs. They've never been out in the wild. But that just incredibly natural instinct to fly took over them immediately and and could have laughed at our manager course of bringing him close to home. But it was this incredible sight to see them to take off like that and just become a part of the system again, on a day to day it's not a my heart's not flying with it. Like it did it that precise, but I love I love watching them. I love watching the strong bonds that they're building with each other, the relationships, the friendships, that they're building, the cuddle puddles that they do, they'll all kind of huddle around in a particular spot learning who's silly learning who's more reserved, and just learning who these new community members are, that are that are rejoining us after such a long time absent. That's probably my favorite part right now.

Michelle Fullner  1:08:38  
Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Tiana, I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Tiana and her team have spent years working toward Condor reintroduction in Northern California. And that effort is, in turn having a positive impact on the ecosystems of an entire region, while also inspiring people across California and beyond that humans can in fact, have a positive reciprocal relationship with the natural world all around us. We don't have to be the worst things we read about humans in the environmental news, and we don't all have to dedicate our careers to wildlife or lead reintroduction projects to make a positive difference for condors. The Yurok tribe website lists ways each of us can help these birds, such as cleaning up micro trash switching to non lead ammunition and reporting poachers. And probably the most direct way you can help these birds is with financial support for the project donations are tax deductible, and I'll put the link for making an online donation in the show notes but you can also just Google Yurok tribe Condor donation and find the page really easily. I want to thank Tiana for taking the time to meet up with me and for welcoming me so warmly to the Condor offices for this interview. And I want to thank my husband Stan, because while I was interviewing Tiana, he was driving our two children then three and five years old, halfway across this very long state to come up and meet me in Humboldt County solo parenting tiny kids on a long car ride is No joke people. The man does a lot to make this podcast possible. And I appreciate him a whole bunch. So if you liked this show, please take a moment and tip your hat to Stan. Even if you're not wearing a hat, invisible hat gratitude is welcome here. And if you want a visible way to show your love to Golden State naturalist, you can leave a review on Apple podcasts by just clicking on the Show scrolling all the way to the bottom and writing just one thing you like about the show super fast. And I don't know about you. But when I'm looking for new podcasts to listen to, I want to know that a lot of people think it's good before I commit any time to it. So leaving a rating and review lets people know it's going to be worth their limited time to give it a listen. And it also just makes my whole day to read these. At the end of each episode. I always tell you something interesting or funny or embarrassing for my week. And this week, it's that I brought home three little tiny scrub oaks from P 20. Today in LA and they planted two of them at my daughter's preschool but the third one which is about an inch and a half tall is just sitting in my dish drainer waiting for me to dig a tiny hole and plant it in my backyard and oaks are Keystone plants. So even though my kitchen has dishes everywhere and an oak tree growing in it, I have to say that at least it's a pretty spectacularly biodiverse kitchen as kitchens go okay, that's all thanks for listening all the way to the end of the episode. I can't wait to see you on the next episode of Golden State naturalist bye.