Interesting info, thanks Percy.
Thank you. I'm always glad to help
I also appreciate your thinking regarding "a viable species".
I'm very much a conservationist but sometimes we have to ask if conserving a particular plant or animal to the detriment of other species, including humans, is wise. I'm certainly not saying that we need to write off the Condor, just that sometimes I believe emotions and nostalgia play too much of a role in rule and regulation making that concerns endangered / protected species.
The species that make a difference to human quality of life are the ones that don't get attention.
Sure, we've all heard of panda, and whooping crane and manatee conservation, and in truth there isn't any reason we couldn't live with those beasts, but do they really make a huge difference to the people they live near? Unless you count tourism, no, not really.
Bats on the other hand, get no attention. They can be vulnerable, though, because it's easy to destroy their roosts. A bat has a fearsome metabolism (you try waving your arms to stay in the air and see how hungry you are afterwords!, and a colony of bats can make an almighty dent in the insect population. Why do we care about insects? Well, it wasn't too long ago that people tried to stay out of Washington DC during the summer on account of the malaria. It's a pity that bats aren't more charismatic, I'm sure they'd get more respect. Ditto toads, and all the various fish species that eat mosquito larvae before the little bloodsuckers can go about their nefarious rounds.
Now, show of hands, who here wouldn't be beside themselves in joy if lead bullets poisoned mosquitos? Those are a critter that I absolutely cannot support the conservation of!
Anyhow, maybe they'll be able to teach the condors to avoid lead somehow. It sounds far fetched, but in the early days the condors kept frying on power lines before people tought them to avoid them. The critters clearly have some capacity for learning.
In South America the andean condor seems to do OK eating dead cows, so maybe if we replace all the people in southern california with cattle (and let's be honest, could we really tell the difference?) the condors would have a viable food source. They're really just too big to subsist on deer and such; they're very specialized animals.
In the meantime we can all hope that someone comes up with a fantastically cheap tungsten alloy that mushrooms on impact the way lead does, never misses and also does the laundry.
</rant>
