A Kettle Of Condors

After our adventures in Pismo Beach, Betsy and I headed up the coast on our way to San Francisco for a meeting with my publisher.  Along the way we always keep an eye out for California Condors, though we've never had any luck.  Here's Betsy enjoying the scenery and "looking for condors."

A little way further up the coast we pulled off at the following look-out.  The scenery was beautiful, and we thought this would be a good place to get out and stretch our legs.

As soon as I got out of the car and took this picture, Betsy says "Hey Jim, take a look at this bird.  Is it a condor?"  I looked at it and said, "Oh yeah, that's a condor all right."  Here's what we saw:

We were excited to see our first condor.  Then Betsy said, "There's another one."  Sure enough, two were flying together.

Soon we noticed more and more of them, until finally they had formed a "kettle," just like hawks or vultures.  (The term kettle comes from the fact that the group of soaring birds look like they are circling within the confines of a kettle.)  Here is the kettle of eight condors.  A ninth condor was also there, soaring by itself.

We showed the condors to several people at the lookout, serving as field guides, and giving them views through our scope and binoculars.

One woman was almost beside herself with excitement.  She said she lived in the area and had looked for condors at this location for the past 15 years, but never saw any.  She had gone to the pinnacles before dawn trying to see them at their nesting grounds, but with no luck.  She had seen only one previous to this, and couldn't believe that we were able to view a large group like this.  In fact, we were looking at roughly 10 percent of the world's population of California Condors.

To document our sighting of condors, Betsy posed with the California Condor page in our Sibley field guide:

Here are a couple of video clips of the condors soaring, shot at maximum zoom with a point-and-shoot camera.  The picture is jittery, but at least it gives some sense of what it was like to watch them flying and interacting with one another.  In the second clip, notice the "wing dipping," which is characteristic of condor flight.