Last month, California condors made the national news in a bizarre and erroneous way. Here’s a brief report.
Namesakes: aircraft
Many aircraft have been named after bird species. Here’s a look at some of the models and manufacturers named condor.
More scientific sketches: 1938-1981
This post (the 200th to this blog) shows 8 artworks that convey scientific information about the California condor.
Code names
Assigning code names to bird species sounds like a good idea. Code names are a sort of short hand that can save space in field and lab notebooks, and facilitate using computers to analyze data.
To be helpful, codes names should be easy to remember and unique for each species being considered. For example, a field researcher working in North America doesn’t need distinct codes for penguins. But a lab researcher in North America might need distinct codes for penguins.
Of course, there is more than one way to assign a code name for a bird species. Here are some of the code names that have been assigned to the California condor.
Letters to the editor of the Los Angeles Times: late 1980s
During the late 1980s, California condors were struggling to survive in the wild. As a result, all the birds were brought into captivity. On the positive side, the captive breeding program was having success.
Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that the California condor was the subject of discussion in the opinion pages of California’s most-prominent newspaper. Here are excerpts from some of these letters.
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Captive
This is another post about articles and books that (a) concern the California condor and (b) have titles that include a particular word. For this post, that word is “captive” and its variant “captivity”.
Letters to the editor of the Los Angeles Times: early 1980s
Starting in the 1980s, there was a substantial increase in the number of letters to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times that concerned the California condor.
Here are excerpts from letters that appeared in the early 1980s. These provide insight on the public’s thinking about the California condor at the time (including some misinformation and misunderstandings).
Continue reading “Letters to the editor of the Los Angeles Times: early 1980s”
