Los Angeles Zoo sets record with 17 California condor chicks hatched in 2024

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A report 17 California condor chicks hatched on the Los Angeles Zoo throughout this yr’s breeding season for the endangered birds, officers introduced Wednesday.

All of the chicks will probably be candidates for launch into the wild as a part of the California Condor Restoration Program, the LA Zoo mentioned in a press release.

The seventeenth and remaining chicken of the season hatched in June and is flourishing, zookeepers mentioned. The earlier report was set in 1997, when 15 California condor chicks hatched on the zoo.

“Our condor workforce has raised the bar as soon as once more within the collaborative effort to save lots of America’s largest flying chicken from extinction,” Rose Legato, the zoo’s Curator of Birds, mentioned within the assertion.

Legato mentioned the latest report is a results of new breeding and rearing strategies developed on the zoo that put two or three chicks collectively to be raised by a single grownup condor performing as a surrogate mother or father.

“The result’s extra condor chicks in this system and in the end extra condors within the wild,” Legato mentioned.

The California Condor Restoration Program is run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Its mission is to propagate the long-lasting chicken that a long time in the past was getting ready to extinction from habitat loss and lead poisoning.

As of December 2023, there have been about 560 California condors on the earth, of which greater than 340 have been residing within the wild, the zoo mentioned.

It’s the biggest land chicken in North America, with wings spanning as much as 9.5 toes (2.9 meters).