kildor's Favourites

Colias palaeno inhabits peat moss habitats such as raised mires and bogged taiga. There is a big Gladkoe Bog nearby but with very scarce Sphagnum and I doubt C. palaeno can breed there. The closest suitable habitats are situated some 100 km to the North. At the same time solitary females may migrate quite fast, perhaps in search for other suitable habitats. This is the fouth female of this species I see in the forest-steppe zone of West Siberia for my life, and the second in Novosibirsk. It is noteworthy that this happened on my 57th birthday.

In August, 1985, I was on a birding trip in California in an effort to see California Condor among other species. We knew that researchers were in the process of trapping all the wild birds to start a captive breeding program. We spent a day with researchers near Mt. Pinos and saw seven different condors. Four of them were wing tagged indicating they had already been captured at least once by researchers. Three of the birds we saw were not tagged, indicating they were wild and had never been caught. This is a shot (35 mm color slide) of one of the wild birds. It was no more than a few months after this date that all California Condors were in captivity and it would be years before they were released into the wild again. All California Condors at present stem from the captive program in one way or another. This is a shot of one of the last truly wild birds. The birds were very high and this image is cropped significantly to show the bird. I have only 6 slides of these birds from that 1985 trip.