Condor Read online

  Writers for egg-collecting magazines couldn’t make much of a struggle pitting humans against condor eggs. Many tried to compensate by playing up the obstacles that stood between the hunters and their prizes—“terrible precipices in whose sides the nest caves of the great vultures were hidden.”

  Kelly Truesdale starred in some of the best of this pulp nonfiction. In 1911, he invited William H. Dawson, a prominent ornithologist and avid egg collector, to join him for a trip into the coastal mountains in San Luis Obispo County. The goal was a cave that had once given Truesdale an irreplaceable prize: a condor egg that was a ghostly shade of white and not pale blue. Truesdale had arranged to sell the egg to a collector in the East for what would have been a record price, but the deal fell through when a middleman declared the egg a fake. Truesdale protested mightily, knowing that the charge could wreck his reputation. When the middleman refused to back down, Truesdale went to plan B.3

  That was William Dawson, who agreed to follow Truesdale to the same cave to obtain a second egg, which with any luck would be the same shade of white.

  Dawson, who wrote about the expedition in The Birds of California (South Mouton Co., 1923), promised not to bore his readers with “the arduous details of that climb, and of our sufferings, poked, prodded, buffeted and gouged, as we made our way upward through the all but impenetrable thicket of buckthorn,” and then up a “half-cylinder shaped rock wall…stately and frowning not only, but full of rifts and caves, soft places in the sandstone, scored out by the elements, or once occupied by a softer substance now decayed and leaked out.”

  The condors saw the two men coming long before the men saw them. When Dawson noticed the great bird “soaring over the heights of his ancestral castle,” the bird “is already looking down: soon [he] settles in at the top of a pine tree where we can study him with binoculars and telescope. We have a pretty good idea that his optical apparatus is better than ours at that, for he is ill at ease and presently casts off.”

  The men kept climbing, pausing when a second condor floated their way, and then a third. The birds circled slowly, then one of them turned and zoomed straight into a cliff. Truesdale and Dawson pointed the binoculars toward what they thought would be the mouth of a cave, but the cave didn’t seem to be there. Both men had seen the bird clearly enough to know that it was up there somewhere, but all they saw was a jagged rock wall.

  They kept looking. A long time passed. “Finally, Kelly caught a flash of color at the mouth of an obscure hole up the cliff-side. He called me over and I confirmed it—the head of a condor thrust anxiously forth from the mouth of the hole, and then withdrawn—a hole so small that I should not have looked for a falcon in it.”

  Dawson wrote that Truesdale flushed the condor from the hole by emitting a “current of catcalls,” which sounds like a funny thing to do. Maybe he dared them to come out and fight like birds. Maybe he just yelled that he was back.

  Truesdale was neither the most prolific condor collector nor the most eccentric. Lloyd Kiff of the Peregrine Fund says that honor goes to a climber named George Harris and his brother Jim, who may have taken thirteen condor eggs from three extremely isolated nest caves between 1889 and 1905. The Harrises worked for an egg dealer and collector named H. R. Taylor, the editor of a widely read bird-egg magazine called The Nidiologist. When the brothers brought him condor eggs, he’d let his readers know, in the hopes that one of them would offer him a huge amount of money. Kiff says $500 was the highest price ever paid for a condor egg. Rumors of higher fees have never been confirmed, and Kiff doesn’t think they were received.

  The Harrises did some stupid things to reach the caves that sometimes had those condor eggs inside them. Often they did little more than tie a single rope around a boulder at the top of a cliff. Then, without attaching safety ropes or harnesses, they’d grab the rope and scramble several hundred feet straight down.

  Condor-egg collectors were eccentric people, Kiff explained. One collector lived in a cave he’d dug in the side of a cliff; another wrote that he had almost reached an egg when the cave he was in collapsed, sparing the man but crushing the prize. Yet another collector reached the entrance to a cave by tying one end of a rope around his waist and looping the middle around the base of a manzanita bush: the far end of the rope had been tied to a rock down at the bottom of a cliff that appeared to weigh as much as the collector. When this man stepped off the cliff, the rock rose slowly as he floated down to the mouth of the cave. When he had the egg, he stepped outside the cave, into the air—and more or less floated back up.

  Truesdale did turn out to be the best-known member of this group. Ian McMillan and his brother, Eben, saw to that. Both rode shotgun on a few of Truesdale’s early egg trips, soaking up everything the older man cared to tell them about the condor and its range. “We were studying the principles and the workings of ecology,” Ian McMillan wrote in his Man and the California Condor. “[This was] long before the new science was heard of in the condor country.”

  I never met Ian McMillan—“Ike” McMillan to his friends—but I did meet his brother, Eben, one fine spring day in the 1990s. I was working on a condor story for National Public Radio. I’d just read about Kelly Truesdale in big brother Ian’s book.

  “Why don’t you come over for some lunch,” Eben said when he heard I was in the area. “Take the road you’re on right now until you see the tree with the big metal sculpture next to it—that’s the tree James Dean ran into on the night he died, you know. Anyway, when you pass the tree, turn right and just keep driving. The ranch house is down the road.”

  We talked for at least two hours on his shady front porch. Actually, he talked, but that was fine with me. Eben McMillan was a folk hero at that point in his life—reporters and environmentalists dropped in all the time—but when I was there he didn’t want to talk much about himself. What he did instead was talk a lot about Truesdale.

  “Truesdale and Dawson didn’t make it to the cave in time to get another one of those white eggs,” he said. “The chick had already hatched. But Kelly took the eggshell pieces back with him, and they were just as white as the first egg. Kelly ended up selling that first egg for something like two hundred and fifty dollars, which was the highest price ever paid for a condor egg. You could buy a nice used Model T with that kind of money. Kelly wasn’t near as dumb as he looked,” McMillan added at the end. “He knew the land just about as well as the condors did. He understood how it fit together.”

  The egg-collecting boom went bust after World War I: young collectors no longer rushed the nests en masse in the spring, and the experienced ones started getting old. Rich enthusiasts hunted for condor eggs at estate sales; some purchased whole collections. Laws that made collecting rare eggs a crime had begun to proliferate, and the scientific skin collectors had abandoned their old allies.

  Condor-egg collectors were among the lowest of the low in the minds of sentimental bird lovers. Egg thieves who did it for the money would have been the lowest of them all. “The taking of eggs for the purpose of selling them for a few paltry dollars [is] an outrage,” wrote photographer William Finley. In his view, the most outrageous of the egg thefts were “perpetrated under the guise of collecting for scientific purposes.”

  Many of the condor eggs were either lost after that or treated with a weird respect. One collector is said to have carried his egg in parades. One missing condor egg was found inside an otherwise empty Quaker Oats box. Another was hidden for years under a sink. One ended up in the attic of a Texas tire store; its owners said it was worth at least $10,000.

  Ian McMillan didn’t think the aging egg collectors deserved the grief they were getting. It was the men with guns who were the real problem, he insisted. “Prowess with a gun was a mark of high distinction,” wrote McMillan. “In this philosophy there was no concern for destruction or depletion…. The more uncommon and rare the target, the more quick and eager was the shooting.”

  Condors looking down on California in the 1920s may
have wondered what was going on. Big metal birds that made an endless roar flew back and forth across the mountains. Long metal animals that belched black smoke rolled back and forth on gleaming trails. Former feeding grounds had been replaced by endless lines of fruit trees.

  The first recorded fight between a condor and a car took place in the 1920s. The bird was devouring a carcass on the Tejon Ranch when a rancher decided to chase it in his jet-black Model T. As the car approached, the condor tried to turn and fly away, but it had just eaten and couldn’t get off the ground. The Model T followed when the bird scrambled off, futilely running and hopping and flapping its wings in an attempt to build speed. When the car got closer, the bird threw up the meal it had just eaten. When the condor slowed down, the car swerved past it, turned around, and headed straight for the bird. Just as it was about to hit the condor, the Model T stopped and a door flew open. The man who got out happened to be, in addition to the ranch foreman, a former ostrich wrestler. When the condor tried to run away again, the man lassoed it and tied it to the back of the car:

  And as he drove back to headquarters thirteen miles away his prisoner kept a violent metallic protest by wildly swinging the tire chains he found in the back of the car. The loudly heralded arrival of [the foreman] and the condor collected most of the ranch personnel, including the awed, superstitious ranch Indians. In the morning the condor was gone. The large wire cage in which the bird had been placed had been cleanly slit. After this incident the Indians took sly pleasure in reporting each time [the condors in the area] were seen soaring over ranch headquarters. The Indians insisted in reporting these flights that the condors dipped low in salute…. As they flew over, raising one yellow talon to each yellow beak in the familiar gesture of derision known the world over.4

  The condor’s range was shrinking fast, especially in the south, where the city of Los Angeles was spreading out like a pancake on a griddle. In 1870, Los Angeles was a dying cattle town with a total of 5,728 residents; thirty years later, it was a booming city of 102,000. Businessmen dreamed of Malthusian growth on lands to the north of the city, and on lands on the far side of the Transverse mountain ranges. Growth like that had long been kept in check by a chronic shortage of water, but in the twenties, everybody thought that problem had been solved. City engineer William Mulholland solved it back in 1915 when he formally opened the aqueduct that drained the Owens River Valley, sending water south across the mountains into Los Angeles.

  If that boom had not gone bust, the California condor would have been doomed. That’s just my opinion, but it seems like common sense if you think about the trend lines. The city of Los Angeles was shooting north toward the heart of the condor’s domain. With it came more hunters, more hikers, and more rich folks who would try to buy the land. Houses would have popped up near the last of many dams built to hold the water taken from Owens Valley. This was the St. Francis Dam, which was completed in May 1928. It blocked a valley that drained into the Santa Clara River, which wound west toward the ocean past towns such as Piru, Fillmore, and Santa Paula. People would have bought into these towns and built them up before moving farther up into the mountains. Condors would not have been protected then. They would have quickly disappeared.

  Everyone who’s ever lived in these small towns knows why that future never happened: at 11:57 P.M. on March 28, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed; forty-five million gallons of water began rolling toward the ocean, led by what at one point was a 180-foot tall wall of black water.5 Houses, chunks of orchard, pieces of the dam, and bodies were also carried slowly forward by the flood. People who had cars were able to outdrive it. Those who tried to run were not so lucky.

  Everyone I knew when I lived in Piru knew someone who was there that night. At the local grocery store these people all told stories that kept kids like me awake on moonlit nights like that one. I would sit in bed and watch the hands on the clock hit 11:57. Then I’d listen for the eerie rumbling sound, described by some of the survivors as the distant roar of an approaching train; the wind in a giant pair of wings.

  eight

  CARL KOFORD

  The wild wastes of a century ago are now dotted with lumber mills, mine shafts and smelters. Under the earth extends a network of pipelines for oil and natural gas and above it, a network of high extension wires for electric current. The canneries and packing houses, oil refineries, aircraft factories and movie studios ship their products to every corner of the Nation and beyond. The Californian of today feels a personal pride in the state’s gargantuan public works; high-ways, bridges, dams and aqueducts. And most of all, of course, he exults the region’s “happy future.”

  —From California: A Guide to the

  Golden State

  The best thing that can happen to a condor nest is that nobody finds it.

  —Carl Koford1

  Somewhere in the Bering Sea, 1943: The military catapult roars across the deck of the USS Richmond like a giant sprung trap, whipping the top-wing scout plane toward the windward side of the cruiser. The part of the catapult that holds the plane accelerates to sixty miles an hour in the space of fifty feet and then hits a padded brace and stops dead. But the single-engine Kingfisher equipped with three machine guns and one depth charge keeps on going, sailing off the deck and out over the water.

  The jolting launch makes the pilot and crew of the plane feel like human cannonballs, but they’re used to it. They know that when the plane leaves the catapult behind, it will start to lose momentum, but only until the propellers seize the wind. At that point the scout plane will come to life and arc up into the sky. As the plane rises, Carl Koford will take out his maps and his binoculars and begin looking for Japanese warships. As he did this surveillance work, he must have thought about the bird he once described as the “acme of soaring flight.” After all, this was the man who would later produce one of the most influential and controversial endangered species reports ever written: The California Condor, researched before and after World War II and published in 1952.2

  The outstanding characteristic of the flight of condors is high stability in soaring. Frequently even an experienced observer mistakes a distant transport plane for a condor or a condor for a plane.

  Carl Koford is the patron saint of condor field research. During World War II, he was the barrel-chested kid in the rear cockpit of the navy scout plane, in between the pilot and the tail gunner. It was his job to scan the water for the periscopes of submarines while looking for potential bombing sites along the Alaskan coast. When he saw a vessel on the Bering Sea, he pointed it out to the pilot; their plane would circle down to buzz the craft until it raised the proper flag. Koford also watched the skies above the horizons for thin black dashes that could only be approaching planes: if the dashes you missed were Japanese Zeros, you could be blown out of the sky. Top-wing scout planes were easy targets compared to Koford’s birds.3

  The pursued bird dives downward in a steep flex-glide, twisting from side to side, and the pursuer follows. Both swoop up out of the dive, flapping at about the same time, flapping at the end of the swoop to gain every possible inch of altitude.

  No one knows what went through Koford’s mind when he was flying those surveillance missions. He was not allowed to even mention his work in letters to family and friends, and when the war was over he didn’t seem to see the point in sitting around telling old war stories. But when the world’s leading expert on California condors looked down out of his plane for signs of trouble, it’s a good bet he thought about the vulture. Koford had been living in the company of condors when Pearl Harbor was bombed. When the war was over, he picked up where he’d left off, taking incredibly detailed notes on the lives of condors in the wild.

  In pursuing the field research I observed living condors between March 1939, and June 1941, on approximately 400 days. After a period of service with the United States Navy I watched condors on 80 days between February and July 1946 and on 15 days subsequently. The record of my personal observations consis
ts of 3500 pages of field notes.

  Carl Koford’s study gave biologists a voice in fights affecting the future of the species, partly by providing them with a legally defensible set of scientific observations. After Koford, it wasn’t enough for ranchers to insist that condors sometimes flew off with living cattle, or for hunters to insist that the birds would soon be gone regardless of what they did, or for the developers and agribusiness-men who wanted the condor’s land to simply take it. After Koford, they needed proof. When they failed to offer it, the condor’s defenders had a way to make them retreat—they had the “definitive” study of the bird, and they weren’t afraid to use it.

  Koford’s book changed the political course of the condor wars by insisting that the bird was savable. Even more important, the study redefined the condor as a creature whose survival was tied to the fate of the wild. Koford’s condor was a bird that needed isolation like fish need water. These birds could not be protected by rules that limited logging and hunting and fishing at the heart of their range; they needed refuges that were closed forever to humans, period. Koford wasn’t the first to put this argument forward, but he was the first to try to back it up with facts he found in the field.

  The need for these facts rose sharply at the end of the 1930s, when the U.S. Forest Service tried to build a road through a stretch of central California wilderness where condors bathed near waterfalls and nested in caves. When the road-building project was delayed by a proposal to turn the area into a sanctuary, the people who wanted the road called the bird an enemy of progress and a threat to the American way. “What Price Condor?” began an article that ran in Field and Stream in 1939. “The bird with the greatest wing-span has outlived its time.”