VENTURA (CBSLA.com) — For the first time, hundreds of people have watched an endangered California condor egg hatched in the wild via live webcam.
Biologists had set up cameras in a cliffside nest at Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in Ventura County in anticipation of the condor’s hatching, which happened at about 9:30 a.m. Monday.
“This live cam takes the viewer right into the nest cave with the condors to watch their behavior and hear the sounds they make, Charles Eldermire, Bird Cams manager at the Cornell Lab, said in a statement.
The egg was incubated as part of the California Condor Recovery Program’s captive breeding effort at the Los Angeles Zoo. The parents, California condor #111 and #509, had laid an egg in March that went missing, so biologists replaced the missing egg with a dummy egg so they would continue to incubate the nest.
The dummy egg was then replaced with a captive-bred egg Saturday.
The condor parents – a 22-year-old female and a 7-year-old mate – have been courting since fall of 2014, and hatched a wild chick in April 2015. That chick died of lead poisoning, a common threat to condors in the wild, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
