Scientists and indigenous individuals unite to assign Colombian condor

Rosendo Quira silently shakes a medicinal plant to attract a condor to the bait. The chook of prey glides by the clouds over Colombia towards a mountain chase some 3,200 meters above the sea.

As this scene performs out, a hidden camera clicks into instruments to recount the ritual.

Amongst a neighborhood of some 300 volunteers, a form of them indigenous individuals cherish Quira, the 52-365 days-ragged stands out for his ancestral facts.

The volunteers deployed closing weekend at 100 web sites around Colombia to behavior the major-ever census of the chook that is emblematic of the Andes mountain differ.

Quira, a used physician within the Purace indigenous reserve, leaves a half of meat on a rock and uses a spray of account to drizzle it with a natural infusion.

In his totally different hand he holds a stick, while his backpack is filled with medicinal crops.

Quickly after, a chook spanning three meters from wingtip to wingtip seems by the clouds defending the clearing and swoops all the vogue down to feast on the offering.

The Kokonukos indigenous individuals attach in suggestions both the condor and the rock where it perches to be sacred.

The volunteers are helping biologists depend the condors, one among the largest birds of prey on this planet, to serve the species continue to exist.

Consultants imagine there are correct 130 condors within the Colombian Andes, where the animal is seriously endangered based mostly on the Worldwide Union for Conservation of Nature.

On a world scale, the condor’s existence is shut to being threatened.

“We maintain to grab what number of there are within the nation and what instruct they’re in,” biologist Adriana Collazos, who set within the hidden camera, told AFP.

The census is the initiative of a series of NGOs, including the Nationwide Pure Parks of Colombia and the Neotropical Foundation.

The ‘solar’s messenger’

There has by no arrive before been a census of Colombia’s condors.

Indigenous individuals from Purace within the nation’s southwest insist there is no longer no longer up to 1 pair of these monogamous birds living of their territory, but some claim to maintain seen one more solitary feminine.

The biologists hope their cameras will solve the mystery.

“If it approaches it’s because we’re spiritually well, if it would no longer arrive, it’s because we’re failing,” talked about Quira after his shut come all the intention by with the condor.

For his neighborhood, the condor is “the solar’s messenger”—it will warn about pending threats or predict local weather alternate. Quira says a condor as soon as got here to him in a dream with recipes for healing the sick.

The condor shall be stumbled on at some stage within the Andes, from Venezuela within the north all the vogue down to the a ways south of Chile and Argentina.

The growth of agriculture and animal husbandry into excessive mountain territories where the condor lives are the major threats to its conservation.

And females lay ideal one egg every two to a pair of years.

In 2018, a condor couple were stumbled on poisoned within the heart of the nation. Conservationists managed to assign them and return them to the wild a pair of months later.

But farmers on the entire exhaust poison to present protection to their animals from assaults.

Even though condors, which can weigh between 9 and 15 kilograms, are scavengers, they’ve been identified to attack are living animals infrequently.

Doable ‘fatal loss’

“Incandescent the populations of species is the achieve apart to open to propose conservation methods,” talked about Fausto Saenz, scientific director at the Neotropical Foundation.

Saenz is hoping to acquire the major census finally ends up in three weeks’ time.

The census will allow future repopulation efforts to hold up a steadiness between girls and men. Nearly half of the condors in Colombia were reared in captivity and released within the Andes as half of these initiatives.

Even though the indigenous individuals of Purace imagine the hidden cameras agonize the sacred chook, they’re working with the biologists out of a wish to serve the condor continue to exist.

“No longer having that symbol would be a fatal loss to our reserve,” talked about Javier Jojoa, the performing governor of the Purace reserve.

© 2021 AFP