Yesterday, 4/6/04, Kevin Cooper and I made our annual trip into Huff’s
Hole, in the Santa Lucia Wilderness Area below Hi Mountain Lookout. Our
group of nine, including 3 of my visiting family from Oregon, cleared
the trail of brush and poison oak and made our way into Hi Valley. We
cleaned out the soil and organic debris from the Chumash grinding holes
near Hi Valley Rock and continued on along its base, where we were
alerted to the presence of a pair of territorial prairie falcons by
there cak-ing vocalizations. One falcon perched at the edge of a pothole
with whitewash- a probable eyrie- located on one of the outcrops between
Hi Valley Rock and the Huff’s Hole cliffs- this was the same pothole
eyrie where peregrine falcon chicks were cross-fostered with prairie
falcon parents many years ago, by Lee Aulman from SCPBRG and Kevin
Cooper from USFS.

We reached the green protrero of Huff’s Hole and made our way up to the
observation point where last year in May- viewing across the intervening
canyon to the cliffs- a resident pair of peregrine falcons had been
observed bringing prey into an eyrie. While the rest of the group was
sitting down and getting out food for lunch at 12 noon, I arrived at the
OP and decided before eating to first scan with my binoculars and search
for a perched peregrine somewhere on that massive cliff exposure- no
luck, but then…

I found myself saying “Oh my God, there is a condor there in a cave!”. I
viewed an orange head and black feathers exposed on the edge of a large
depression in the cliffs, more than 1/4 mile distance. For the next 3
hours, we watched with binoculars and spotting scope, and photographed
with telephoto lense and by videotaping. Condor B168 was identified by
his wing tag numbers and by the telonics equipment that Kathleen Intorf
and Mike Tyner used to get a radio signal- he is a Ventana Wilderness
Society released bird, a 7 year old male. The condor entered and
disappeared into the cave about a half hour, reemerged awhile preening
and stretching wings, then took flight soaring above the ridgeline about
25 minutes, sometimes among neighboring turkey vultures. The condor
appeared to be departing to the north above the ridgeline beyond our
view, for our apparent last look at it, but then returned up high and
swept back and forth above the cliff face. More excitement when B168 was
dived on by a red-tailed hawk (Gary Guliazi later spotted the red-tail’s
stick nest occupied by an incubating adult, on the cliffface below where
the condor had been attacked).

I was videotaping as the condor swept along the cliffs and circling
around “Dragon’s Head”, and was pleased for my niece Emily who is
gathering information, incluing videotaping, for her high school science
project and talk she will be giving on California Condor research…it
was dramatic firsthand experience in the field for her, in spite of her
great fear of poison oak, ticks and bugs in general! The condor made
several more brief flights by the time we departed and took a last look
back to the cliffs in the distance at 3pm.

We sweated our way up the exhausting climb back to the lookout on Hi
Mountain…a good day had by all. We will now be looking into B168’s
other recent radio tracking movements and whereabouts by communicating
with the VWS and USFWS condor staff. Monitoring condor activity at
Huff’s Hole will continue, where last condor nesting occurred in the
early 1970’s more than 30 years ago.

Steve Schubert