Condor Read online

  The author of this article was H. H. Sheldon, an exasperated businessman and naturalist who thought the road should be built. Sheldon didn’t think the condor deserved the attention and support it was then attracting, given the ominous state of world affairs. Europe was a “powder keg” with war “sparking along the fuse”; Asia and Spain were places where bombs were “blasting children to bits.” A second world war was lurking out there somewhere, Sheldon feared, and of course he was right about that.

  But when Sheldon read the papers in towns such as Santa Barbara, he didn’t find articles warning of war. Instead he found headlines warning of a threat to a big black vulture that was doomed in any case. “In size and structure the condor is a magnificent bird,” Sheldon wrote. “But its habits are deplorable and its purpose is finished.” Sheldon later qualified the line about the condor’s magnificent size, reminding the readers of Field and Stream that “size alone is no guarantee of virtue. If the elephant had the habits of a hyena, no one would mourn its passing.”

  Sheldon threw every insult at the condor he could think of, describing it as ugly, putrid, clumsy, obsolete—a downright “evil-appearing bird, dressed in a scrofulous black with bloody head”:

  His habits would make a guillotine look like an angel of mercy. He is not a killer; he is a glutton of death. He displays all the characteristics of a pig, and some that the most disreputable pig would disown. Gourmand and ghoul, gorging himself on dead or dying animals is his sole object in life. When he has stuffed himself to the limits of his capacity, not even his great 10-foot spread of wings can lift him from the ground without tremendous effort.

  Sheldon did not understand how a bird like this could take precedence “over the siege of Madrid and [the saga of ] Americans stranded in Shanghai.” And “[f ]ew in the East have heard of it. Few in the west have seen it…And so little is known about it, even in the west, where it has lived through ages, that conservationists actually believe it can be saved from extinction by setting up sanctuaries for its use.”

  Sheldon didn’t think sanctuaries would do the bird any good, all but daring those who disagreed to prove their point. How sad it seemed to Sheldon that after failing to lift a finger to conserve the California grizzly, the state’s “conservationists” would end up fighting for this. “I am a naturalist and a conservationist,” Sheldon wrote, “and [I] believe the passing of any species to extinction would affect me with more regret than would assail the average individual. But to set aside a sanctuary in the belief that the condor will continue to exist is to act without knowledge of the facts.” What Sheldon left out was that there were no facts about the wild condors’ needs, because no one had ever sat and watched them live their lives.

  Koford was living in the mountains that were the condors’ home then—a place called the Sespe, because it had once been part of the vast Sespe Ranch. The research grant that put him there, funded by two rich condor enthusiasts, required him to work alone and at a distance from the condors, save for the occasional photo. His goal, as he put it, was to “discover, investigate and record all obtainable…data dealing with the natural history and especially the environmental relations of the California condor.”

  This project was the brainchild of Joseph Grinnell. This was the same Joe Grinnell who’d fought attempts to limit “shotgun ornithology,” but by the 1930s, it was clear that these birds needed a different kind of attention. Grinnell didn’t think there were more than twenty-five pairs of California condors left in the world in the late 1930s, and it was his hunch that those numbers were falling. Farmers and ranchers had been killing off ground squirrels and other rodents by spreading a slow-acting poison called thallium across a good part of the condor’s range. Grinnell thought the practice was insidious but hadn’t been able to stop it.

  He asked the National Audubon Society to help him cover the costs of the project, and the society jumped at the chance. Audubon was then the most powerful environmental group in the United States, but in the early 1930s, it had been consumed by in-house policy fights and bitter power struggles. John Baker, a Wall Street investment broker who was Audubon’s director, was trying to harness the organization’s wasted energy when Grinnell got in touch with him. Baker said he would gladly add a condor job to a short list of projects to be covered by a brand-new Audubon Research Fellowship program. The ivory-billed woodpecker and the California condor would be the first two species studied.

  Grinnell had one request. Audubon was “not to issue any publicity in relation to the California condor without submitting the same in advance for approval or rejection to those in charge of the research project at the University of California, and vice-versa.” This was supposed to make it harder for unscrupulous collectors to find the nest caves. But the real goal was to drop a cloak of invisibility over the entire refuge. Grinnell apparently thought the condor could be saved on a need-to-know basis. Carl Koford’s job was to find out whether he was right.

  Koford hitched his first ride into condor country in the spring of 1939, wearing the hobnailed logging boots he always took to the field. In his backpack was a letter of introduction from Grinnell, who was known to everyone in California who cared about wildlife. The letter said Koford was a man with a sensitive and unusual ecological mission, for “it is the knowledge of the living condors that he specially seeks”:

  In carrying out his field work Mr. Koford has been earnestly enjoined not to disturb the birds in any vital way; his aim is to practice technical “watching” with glasses, from a distance, whereby he will gradually learn the ways of life of this dramatically interesting bird species.

  I hereby bespeak for Mr. Koford the help of Forest officers throughout the country that he needs, in his work, to penetrate; also, the sympathetic and possibly outright aid of whomever else he may meet…. He desires no publicity whatsoever; none of us concerned wishes anything said or done, as through newspaper channels, which would in any degree increase the hazards of existence for these birds.4

  The famous naturalist never said why he picked Koford to do this particular job; Grinnell died of a heart attack in 1939. “I trust that you will have notified one or two of your colleagues to watch out for him,” said Grinnell in one of his last letters, to a friend in the U.S. Forest Service. “He is a quiet, earnest chap and will ‘wear well,’ I predict.” Grinnell thought Koford might enjoy working in an isolated setting.

  As it turned out, “enjoy” was not the word. Koford took to condor country like a feral cat with a notebook in its paw, stalking the birds for weeks on end, writing down everything. He always used a German technical pen with an extremely fine point. He always used one particular kind of notebook. He always copied his field notes into a second notebook before going to sleep, in script that’s hard to read without a magnifying glass.

  Field notation is a hoary art that greatly predates Charles Darwin, who started dividing living groups by species in the eighteenth century. But Koford wasn’t looking for phylogenetic distinctions in the Sespe, or in finding a bug he could name after himself. What he did instead was to fill thousands of pages with descriptions of condor behavior. Hardly anybody studied so-called nonessential species in the 1930s, and when they did, they usually studied carcasses. But there was Koford, trying hard to write it all down. Wide-angle note taking of this sort was known as “the Grinnellian method,” in which “the behavior of the animal is described and everything else which is thought by the collector to be of use in the study of the species is put on record at the time the observations are made in the field.” If the day is overcast, you write that down. If the bird starts blinking, you start counting.

  4:30 P.M.—This condor, like others I have watched, blinks constantly; most blinks are from a half to three seconds apart; 5 seconds seems about maximum. I wonder whether a red iris has any red filter effect on a bird’s vision. The brightest orange on a condor is between the bill and the feathers between the eyes.

  Koford was the first to note that parent condors rar
ely fly directly to the nest caves, choosing instead to land nearby and look around for predators. Instead of merely noting that a bird has landed, he writes about “a condor circling with legs dangling about 150 feet above the cliff,” and then touching down after making five quick backward movements with its wings. After this bird landed and opened its bill, Koford noted an “orange tongue lying on the lower mandible”; a few seconds later “its head gave one sharp shake as if to dislodge a fly.”

  “I have never seen his equal,” says Steve Herman, a staunch defender and former student of Koford’s. “Biologists around today say a lot of it is hype, but let me tell you something. In the field, they wouldn’t have raised a pimple on Koford’s ass.”

  November 2001: I’m sitting at the point of a rock escarpment in the middle of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in the Ventura County backcountry, taking in the prehistoric view. The map in my pocket says I’m looking at one of the lines of mountains in the Transverse Ranges. But I’m having trouble seeing the “line” part. What I see instead is a jumbled mess of hugely varied landscapes, bent and broken in a way that makes it look like something punched its way up through the crust of the earth.

  Off in the distance, near the horizon, is the brown haze that marks the outskirts of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Closer in, on a grass plateau cracked open by earthquakes, I see tilted pasturelands once grazed by Spanish cattle. Rolling hillsides end in cliffs that make it look like a colossal beast beneath the earth is trying to punch its way out. “Geologic upthrust” is the scientific term used to describe the scene in front of me. I half expect to see a giant stone fist come crashing up through one of the mountains.

  I can see a knifelike fissure running roughly north and south. I’m told it’s an offshoot of the “big bend” that turns the San Andreas fault line to the east beneath the Transverse. When David Brower joked that condors could only be saved by an earthquake big enough to put Los Angeles under the Pacific Ocean, it was this network of fault lines that he was counting on to do it.

  But the fissure isn’t what dominates the view from the spot known by biologists as “Koford’s Observation Point,” or “Koford’s O.P.” The dominant thing is a pockmarked curtain of yellowish cliffs that ends in a wide plateau on my side of the fissure. The cliffs fall abruptly for several hundred feet into a valley full of chaparral. Koford’s escarpment rises on the other side of that valley.

  I’m thinking three thoughts while I’m taking in the view. One is that it’s easy to see why Koford came up here all the time. The pockmarks in those yellow cliffs are nest caves used by condors in his day. From here, with a sitting scope, he could sit and watch them all day long.

  I’m also thinking about the grizzly bear head that used to hang on the wall of Lechler’s grocery store in Piru, at the southern base of these mountains. I remember sitting in Lechler’s store in the early 1960s and staring at that head, imagining that its giant body was sticking out of the other side of the wall. When Mr. Lechler told me that was not the case, I decided the body was still walking around in the mountains to the north, feeling around for its head. That thought returned to me this morning when I hiked across some big black bear tracks.

  I’m also thinking that you’d have to be nuts to try to move around out there. The chaparral below looks like concertina wire, and the cliffs resemble a scene from Mordor in Lord of the Rings. Moving back and forth would have been hell, which may be why Koford thrived there. Herman says Koford appeared to enjoy leaving students in his dust. And like all of Grinnell’s disciples, he was skilled at living off the land. He drank the water he found in potholes and he often shot his meals; the speed with which he skinned small birds was on a par with the naturalists of old.

  “Once when we were in the mountains of Mexico looking for the last of the Mexican grizzly bears,” Herman wrote in an e-mail,

  he saw me struggling with a small sparrow I had shot, trying to relieve it of its skin and stuff it in a way that would preserve it….

  Carl watched me…for a few minutes and then took the bird. He fit his drugstore reading glasses on his nose and settled into a canvas chair and began wielding his scalpel with considerable skill. Zip, zip, zip and the skin was off. A few more minutes and the bird was stuffed and wrapped, as if it were lying in state. Something that would have taken me nearly an hour had taken Koford minutes.

  Old-school ornithologists like to joke that you can’t really understand a study species until you’ve eaten it, but condor steaks were not on Koford’s menu, and the smaller birds were eaten rarely. Koford’s old friends say he often skipped meals when he was out in the field. At times his diet seemed to consist entirely of canned apricots. One of the biologists who followed Koford into the Sespe Condor Sanctuary says he could tell where Koford had been by looking for the empty cans.

  Koford had a cabin a couple of miles to the south of his escarpment. It looked out on a pond the condors used to bathe in all the time. But the bulk of his work was done on the other side of the broad dry canyon interrupted by the curtain of pockmarked cliffs. After hacking partway through that nasty chaparral for a couple days, he’d build a blind and watch the condor caves for weeks at a time, focusing on a breeding pair with a fledgling he called Oscar. Koford saw Oscar’s parents chase off ravens and golden eagles. Once he watched the chick try fruitlessly to scratch its itchy head. “Five times the left foot was brought to the head to scratch,” he wrote in his field notes. “Each time only one or two quick strokes were managed before the foot had to be hastily replaced…” Koford also watched a parent bird feed the chick by holding its open bill about an inch above the chick’s head. “The chick then jams its head up into the adult’s throat from below and the adult’s head [starts shaking], either from regurgitation or from the wrestling actions of the chick. After a few seconds the chick pulled its head down out of the parent’s throat, holding a light-colored chunk of partially digested animal remains. The chick wolfed it down and beat its wings to beg the parent bird for more. It went on this way for quite some time.”

  Koford didn’t think much of the gizmos sometimes used to make the lives of the note-takers easier. Other field biologists tape-recorded their observations and transcribed them later. Koford thought the practice lazy. His 32-power sighting scope and the wreck he called his car may have been his only prized technological possessions.

  “Carl was frugal,” said Herman, putting it delicately. “For instance, his car had a tendency to stall…. It turned out that he had adjusted the carburetor so that the gas/air mixture was very, very lean, i.e., as little gas as possible relative to the air. It was so lean that the motor only ran when the car was moving.”5

  Herman, who is in his seventies, thinks the differences between what Koford did and what field biologists do now are extremely difficult to fathom. Koford never tried to trap the birds and bolt ID tags to their wings or test their blood for man-made poisons. He never tried to follow them with tracking devices or even to find out where all the nests were. For the most part Koford sat and watched and wrote it all down, even if it didn’t seem important.

  “He was a generalist,” said Herman. “He’s the one who built the baseline. The fact of the matter is that condors really were wild birds in Koford’s day, and even my day. They are no longer, and in fact they are about as far from being truly wild as anything could get and still fly around.”

  Herman wrote those words years later when the hands-off school of condor management launched by Koford’s work was under attack by so-called hands-on scientists with the zoos and the federal government. He thinks abandoning the Koford approach was a terrible mistake.

  Koford wasn’t always the only human near the condor caves. Before the war, he chased off strangers armed with cameras and guns, but sometimes the strangers made it past him. Once, a magazine photographer brought a model into one of the nest caves, shooting pictures while she posed with one of the birds. Others would flush out the birds by throwing rocks at them or firing shots
into the air.

  Some who came to visit Koford and the birds were anything but stangers. Loye Miller made the trip in 1939 with his son Alden, who’d just taken over the job of running the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at U.C.-Berkeley. After peering into Oscar’s cave through Koford’s sighting scope, they watched a pair of condors stage what Loye Miller called a “clumsy dogfight” aloft. He also wrote of watching a group of eleven birds fly near the ridge the men were standing on, passing back and forth at eye level and striking “a variety of poses in the air.” Miller was amazed by the way the birds moved around in air that was almost completely still, twisting their tails and calibrating the giant black feathers at the ends of their wings. Later they saw the condors linger over a scoured carcass, appearing to “loaf on the wing for a time for the mere pleasure of the exercise.”

  Koford spent a lot of time with J. R. Pemberton and Ed Harrison, oilmen and former egg collectors who helped fund his research grant and told him how to get to Oscar’s cave. Pemberton was a physically imposing man who’d made a fortune building a railroad in Patagonia; now he was the California state official who evaluated oil-drilling proposals. Harrison was the heir to an oil fortune who didn’t need to work for a living; when condor-egg hunting was outlawed in the early 1900s, he’d begun pursuing other egg collections. The two men shared an interest in the condor and the cracked terrain that was its home. There was lots of oil hidden under this terrain, and they were looking for potential drilling sites. When movie cameras first became portable, Harrison and Pemberton took one up the mountains to the high plateaus that form parts of the Sespe, where they started filming condors in their caves.

  These two men were Koford’s best friends in the field at the time, always bringing him groceries and the latest camera gear. On more than one occasion, the three of them filmed condors flying in and out of their nests, even though that wasn’t always what the condors wanted to be doing. Pemberton sometimes encouraged the birds out by firing his pistol. Harrison and Koford filmed each other sitting inside nest caves with a condor in their arms. I saw the films in Harrison’s office in Los Angeles.6