The beneficial role of ranching to wildlife conservation is increasingly recognized by landowners and wildlife managers and is used to focus on a common goal of maintaining open, working landscapes. Ranching provides resources, such as habitat, drinking water at livestock troughs, and forage, for a diverse variety of wildlife, including the critically endangered California condor, Gymnogyps californianus. Carcasses and animal remains left in the field by ranching and hunting operations are important food sources for condors. Pinnacles National Park, a reintroduction site for condors, is surrounded by working rangelands. Condors released in to the wild are closely monitored to collect data on their habitat use, foraging patterns, and threats to their recovery. As condors range over wide expanses, it becomes difficult to constantly track their movements and observe behaviors, such as feeding. California condors can fly up to 100 miles in a single day of foraging, and because feeding may take place during a few minutes or several hours, monitoring strategies have limited ability to identify feeding events and food types. The use of GPS and GSM technologies to collect and store fine-scale data has increased our ability to document where condors are foraging and what they are foraging on. In reviewing data collected over the past 11 years of condor reintroductions at Pinnacles National Park, there is a clear trend. While foraging over areas surrounding Pinnacles, condors locate a significant proportion of food on privately owned lands with active ranching and hunting operations. When endangered species recovery is reliant on operations on private lands, we need to recognize the contribution made by those landowners. Pinnacles National Park has recognized these contributions and is working to develop partnerships with our ranching community to promote conservation of rangelands and the California condor.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.