First modification:
Talagante (Chile) (AFP) – Alhué and Mailén, two Andean condor specimens, were born in captivity in a rehabilitation center near Santiago. The hope is that they can be released and breed in the mountains to increase the population of the largest flying bird in the world.
His parents are two pairs of condors who have lived for years in the Center for the Rehabilitation of Birds of Prey (CRAR) of the Chilean Ornithologists Union, located in the town of Talagante (40km from Santiago). A facility for birds that cannot live in freedom because they cannot fly or because they are used to the close presence of the human being.
“The bet of this is to introduce condors to nature from condors that are not free, that are here for life,” explains Eduardo Pavez, founder of CRAR.
The hope of those responsible for this center is that, at some point, Alhué, a male, and Mailén, a female, will break the destiny of their parents and be released.
The chicks still have clumsy, insecure movements and carry a grayish down, typical of condor chicks with a few weeks of life.
According to the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the condor is classified as a vulnerable species and estimates that 6,700 specimens live in the wild.
revered and threatened
The condor, revered by indigenous peoples and included in the national shields of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, is virtually extinct in Venezuela, while the largest populations can be observed in southern Argentina and Chile.
Its greatest threat is the use of the soil, the human occupation of the mountain range and, above all, the lack of food.
The CRAR, founded in 1990, receives all kinds of birds of prey – owls, falcons and condors – injured, injured or kept in captivity. The main purpose is to rehabilitate them and return them to their natural environment. But many are disabled.
For example, Alhué’s mother collided in 1997 with an electrical transmission line north of Santiago. The sequelae left by those injuries prevent him from flying. Mailén’s mother, on the other hand, was brought to CRAR in 2006 from Aysén, one of the southernmost regions of Chile, when she was around one year old. She but she got used to the human’s presence, so she can’t be released.
In these years, 25 condor chicks born in captivity have passed through the CRAR. Four died in the center, while 13 have already been released, four will soon be released and another four will remain in the center “for not being able to fly or for being used to being human.”
A joint effort involving volunteers, the Chilean Ornithologists Union (Unorch), the Meri Foundation, the Chilean National Zoo and Rewilding Chile (formerly Tompkins Conservation Chile).
upbringing and education
Within six to nine months, when Alhué and Mailén are fully developed, they will no longer be in the same cage with their parents.
With this, the parents will be able to lay a new egg one year after the previous one (in nature this happens every two or three years) and the chicks, already converted into juveniles and covered with brown plumage, will begin learning how to socialize with others. copies.
They will be taken to a large cage where non-releasable adults can currently be seen living with juveniles that are candidates for the wild. There they fly from one place to another and learn to communicate with other conspecifics.
“Here a hierarchy is established where the adult males are the dominant ones. That hierarchy they have to learn, sometimes by force of pecks, to find their place in the condor society,” explains Pavez.
A necessary education so that when Mailén and Alhué are taken to the mountains, possibly in the austral spring of 2024, they know how to create links with other experienced wild condors who will show them the territory, places to feed and life in the wild.
#captiveborn #condors #Chile #hope #increase #population