Condor Read online

  Koford quit his fellowship to go to war when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. During the war, he may have used an old birder’s trick to tell Harrison where he was. On postcards that were otherwise free of any hints of his location, Koford is said to have mentioned a species of bird that could only be found near the Bering Sea, where the USS Richmond was stationed.

  World War II changed California almost as much as it changed Japan. Hundreds of thousands of military families moved out to the Los Angeles area; rows of homes and freeways were unrolled in every direction. Factories and cars put much more pollution up into the air. Farmers started spraying everything they grew with an amazingly effective bug killer known as DDT, which was manufactured by the ton in a factory near the Santa Monica Bay. Ranchers, not to be outdone, started buying a new squirrel-killer called Compound 1080.

  Koford returned to his study site in the mountains north of Los Angeles to find that an oil-drilling platform had been built on top of the pond the condors had once bathed in near his cabin. Access roads to other wells had been built and then widened. Mining companies were lusting after phosphate reserves, and hunters armed with army surplus rifles buzzed around like horseflies.

  Koford noted the changes and went back to his birds. They seemed less common than they’d been before the war—smaller groups and fewer sightings—but there didn’t seem to be a way to test that observation. After interviewing ranchers and other locals and watching the birds, he guessed that at the end of World War II, between sixty and 120 condors were left. Later, his allies only mentioned the low end of that estimate, which was very low indeed. It meant that it would only take a small streak of bad luck to send the species into yet another downward spiral, and with all the changes going on in California, bad luck was certain. In other words, Koford wrote, people should be told that “the precarious natural balance of the population can be easily upset in the direction leading to extinction.”

  Koford thought his field notes proved the need to separate the men from the birds. So did Alden Miller, Koford’s adviser after the death of Joseph Grinnell. Miller was an accomplished ornithologist whose conservation strategies were rarely questioned and often accepted as gospel. In public, he was formal to the point of seeming imperious at times; behind the scenes, he was known as an enemy you did not want to make. Miller fought ferociously for the things he held dear and true.

  He didn’t think there was any doubt about what the condor needed. Like Koford and Grinnell, he thought the condor needed untouched wilderness and absolute isolation. Activities that might draw attention to the bird were not to be condoned. Miller felt strongly that photography was one of those activities, arguing at times that too many pictures of the birds had already been taken.

  This new tactic put Koford at odds with his old friends and patrons Pemberton and Harrison. But when the war ended, Koford met Ian and Eben McMillan, who would eventually do more to promote the hands-off approach to condors than almost anyone else. Ian McMillan wrote that he was doing chores in his yard one day when Koford drove up in his broken-down jalopy and introduced himself. McMillan saw a “lean but well-built youth who turned out to be older than he looked.” Maybe it was the fine spring day or something in the way Koford moved that made McMillan think of old times: “The situation was somehow reminiscent of former days, when Kelly Truesdale would arrive at the old homesteading McMillan canyon with intriguing reports of his collecting adventures.”

  The McMillans and Koford became fast friends. The writer Dave Darlington said Eben seemed to revel in Koford’s many eccentricities, including his habit of bursting into unexpected laughter and not telling anyone why. “He had a very peculiar sense of humor,” Eben told Darlington, adding he never once saw Koford in a coat, even when the ground was thick with snow.

  He was always practicing self-discipline; it would have been pretty near impossible to sell him something he didn’t need. Koford was a totally objective person—he never joked, never said anything he didn’t mean, never went out on a limb…he was sort of a mechanical person—he had no human weaknesses. His integrity was untouchable, which made him unique in a society where integrity has lost its meaning.

  Eben and Ian McMillan helped Koford meet Truesdale and many of Truesdale’s old competitors. Then they showed him how to get around. In the 1940s, no one knew the condor’s range like the McMillan boys did, and they passed all that knowledge on to Koford. They fed him and took care of him, and defended his work when Pemberton and Harrison faded from his life, and when Koford left the country in the 1950s, the McMillans spoke for him.

  People who have made their way through all 3,500 pages of Carl Koford’s field notes say that his image of the condor seemed to change when he returned from the Pacific Theater. References to condors disturbed by people seemed to get a lot more common, as did the idea that condors were less sanguine than they looked:

  One factor leading to a false idea of tameness of condors is the lag in reaction of the birds to disturbance. Commonly when a condor does not leave its perch as a consequence of a man close by, it will leave several minutes later when a man has walked several hundred feet away…

  One man, by disturbing the birds at critical places during the day, can prevent roosting over an area of several square miles.

  Koford said the condors were rattled by the sounds of trees being cut and the sounds of airplanes flying over their nest caves. “Even the buzz of a motion picture camera 100 yards from a perched adult appears to be noticed…,” he wrote. Still photographers were even more of a problem.

  The failure of some nests known to me was probably due, at least in part, to the activity of these men. Even with great care, a party which I assisted kept the nesting adult from the egg or chick on some occasions. Other photographers were much less solicitous of the welfare of the birds and some of their activities were literally cruel. Even when photographing a bird with a large telephoto lens, one must be comparatively close to the subject…. There is little to be gained by attempting to obtain more photographs of these birds.

  Koford’s study was hailed as definitive long before it was published by the National Audubon Society in 1952. In 1947, the federal government turned his study area into a 53,000-acre condor sanctuary, tearing out the hiking trails and locking out the fishermen and hunters. Koford was delighted until he heard that the place would be called the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, which was sure to draw the birders in.

  It was on the maps and that’s where everybody thought they could go to see condors—including people like Roger Tory Peterson. He wrote in one of his books, “Well the condors have their sanctuary now.” As though a big sanctuary would take care of everything, even though the condors spent most of their time off the sanctuary, foraging on private lands.

  Koford didn’t think anybody should be let near the condors, including researchers like him. Watching from a distance on a limited basis was probably okay, but getting close enough to be noticed was essentially an act of violence. Koford had also become convinced that there was no justification for entering the nest cave with a condor still inside it. He had done it so many times, but those were mistakes he did not want to see repeated.

  This was not a notion that went over very well in the scientific community; many critics say it helped accelerate the birds’ decline. Noel Snyder, the leader of the California Condor Recovery Program for part of the eighties, called this philosophy “a curse that endured for nearly 30 years, totally inhibiting much needed research.”7

  There’s no doubt that Koford helped to complicate the lives of the scientists who later tried to lay their hands on the last of the free-flying California condors. On the other hand, the condors would not have been out there if not for him. They would have been gone.

  nine

  HANDS-ON

  One hot morning in the summer of 1966, my mom and dad told my sister, Kirsten, my brother, Peter, and me to get out of bed, put on our Sunday-school clothes, and walk down to the Piru train station. I knew r
ight away that they’d gone nuts, since it wasn’t Sunday and the train station had been closed for years.

  Half an hour later we were riding east in an old-fashioned wooden passenger car attached to a gleaming steam engine that had been rented by the company my father worked for. When the train started rolling out of town, my Mexican friends rode their bikes alongside us, waving and yelling things that made me glad Mom and Dad did not speak Spanish.

  This would be the last train to leave Piru for at least fifty years. When it was gone, the tracks were torn up and trucked off to a dump. But I didn’t know that at the time, and the ride itself was fun, with booze for the grown-ups, food for the kids, and entertainment out the windows. Mom says there was a jazz quartet in one of the passenger cars, but that must have been a different ghost train. I don’t remember hearing any jazz.

  Halfway to our destination, a bunch of fake Indians rode out of the orchards on some horses. Fake cowboys were chasing them, shooting fake bullets.

  The Indians escaped by riding up the road that led to the county dump. We chugged eastward toward the former hog farm that was our destination, passing a notoriously dangerous motorcycle track and a work crew from the county jail.

  The train ride through the valley was supposed to celebrate the end of an era, I was told—a time when the residents of Los Angeles proper called the towns at the edge of the Transverse Ranges “the home of pigs and prisoners.” As the train trip ended, we looked out at the beginnings of the master-planned community my father had been working on. In real-estate speak, the place was far too big to qualify as a suburb, being better suited to phrases like “semi-autonomous regional center,” “new town,” or “middle landscape.”

  The city was called Valencia. I remember noticing that Dad was proud of what he’d helped accomplish. I also remember meeting the mayor of the real city of Valencia, who’d been flown in from Spain to mark the occasion. Later that day Peter was run over by a golf cart; when he turned out to be fine, we caught a ride home to Piru.

  The historian Carey McWilliams once wrote that the history of Southern California is the history of its booms, and in the mid-to-early sixties, Los Angeles blew up like a bomb. The freeway to be known as Interstate 5 was under construction then, and suburban developments of every shape and size were chasing it north. These were changes you could see from parts of the condors’ breeding grounds.

  Ian McMillan, the rancher and well-known condor activist, thought of suburbs as abominations. In his book, he wrote about the fight to save the condor’s world from the forces of suburban sprawl; he wrote of looking down upon their work one morning in May 1965 from the top of a mountain in the middle of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Pointing his telescope toward the homes, McMillan claimed to see what he always saw when he looked down from this spot: “rows of new dwellings that seemed to have spread across a few new acres of bottom land.”

  In 1965, the new town of Valencia would have looked as if it was rising all at once—homes, new shopping centers, an upscale golf course, and a Magic Mountain theme park. When Valencia was finished, this new part of California would be terraformed, clean and green, with no rotting cattle lying on the front lawns and no giant vultures in the trees.

  McMillan didn’t like the air pollution these new worlds produced. Up on that mountain in the spring of 1965, he’d been alarmed by the smog rolling toward him.

  By late in the afternoon it was filling the canyons of the condor refuge to a height of three thousand feet. Looking in the direction of Fillmore I could barely make out landmarks five miles away. Similar landmarks ten miles away had been clearly visible this morning. As I looked out at this spreading blanket of foul air, I thought again of survival. What were the effects on the condor of this new man-made factor? To what extent would the change in visibility affect the bird’s success in foraging? I had seen native trees that were dying from the effects of air pollution. I had experienced the eye irritation that attacks one in smog of high intensity. What is the effect of all of this on the telescopic eye of the condor?

  Ian and his brother, Eben, spent part of the sixties trying to update Carl Koford’s work. When they weren’t doing that they were fighting a $90 million proposal to dam Sespe Creek, the largest undammed creek left in Southern California.

  The creek in question happened to run through the center of the condor’s range, crashing down out of the mountains through a twisted set of high rock walls before leveling out and slowing down just behind the town of Fillmore. “The crooked Sespe is fantastic beyond anything man has yet constructed,” Ian McMillan wrote. “Even if it were not a main haunt of the California condor, the area would be worthy of care and preservation as an incomparable piece of wild country.”

  Strenuous endorsements of this point of view were provided by the New York office of the National Audubon Society, and by Alden Miller, the man who had succeeded Joe Grinnell as the director of the influential Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. Miller left no doubt at all that he thought this plan would be a shot through the condor’s heart. “There must be no yielding to development,” he said, while pushing to expand the sanctuary. “We need to hold rigorously to what is now set out to be protected land.”

  The plan to tame the Sespe had been thought up with the help of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, which was then in the process of losing its first major political battle to David Brower and the Sierra Club. Two large dams and one diversion dam were to block the flow of the Sespe Creek, filling two large reservoirs and one twenty-five-mile conduit. With water from the reservoirs, local developers would be able to build more houses. Towns such as Fillmore would bloom as hunters, fishermen, and water-skiers stopped in on their way up to the dams, and as the water stored behind the dams fed more farms and homes. The reservoirs would be stocked with fish pumped out of local hatcheries, the new road through the mountains would make year-round ingress easy, the fully developed project would draw two million customers a year, and Ventura County would live profitably ever after.

  Local folks behind the Sespe project didn’t like it when the National Audubon Society marched into town and denounced them as a bunch of condor killers. Fred Sibley’s job had just been created by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and nobody seemed to know what he was going to make of it. What exactly was an “endangered species specialist” anyway? Was it like being the condor’s public defender?

  “Forty-nine dirty birds” is what the prodam forces called the condors early on. But when the fight to save Sespe Creek got hot, they abruptly changed their tune.

  After briefly arguing that human needs must come before the needs of giant vultures, the backers of the Sespe plan began to insist that the condor would be lost without them. “Audubon is interested in saving nothing but the condor,” wrote one supporter of the dams. “United Water Conservation group [named after the Ventura County United Water Conservation District] is a true conservation group. It wants to save vitally needed water and the condor.”

  Carl Koford’s old friend Ed Harrison supported the plan to dam the Sespe Creek and the plan to build an access road through the condor sanctuary. Harrison insisted that the condors weren’t nearly so reclusive and fragile as Koford said they were. He also thought the condor’s repuation would improve if more “recreationists” saw them while driving through the “preservation zone,” and surely this would make more people care about keeping the species alive. Approaching the birds could easily be prohibited, Harrison said. All you had to do was build tall wire-mesh fences on either side of the road.

  Koford hated this point of view, as did everyone at Audubon. But Harrison insisted that the old approach had simply failed to save the bird. He thought the time had come to take more drastic steps to save the condors from extinction: if that meant building fences and keeping birds in captive breeding programs, so be it.

  As far as I know, there are no records of Koford’s reaction to Harrison’s plan. But it’s safe to say he did not
jump for joy. Ian McMillan was more outspoken, as usual, arguing that “with the advice and cooperation of the condor cagers, the developers [have] embroidered their proposals of becoming fairy godfathers to the condor.”

  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service threw biologist Fred Sibley into this fight in 1967 after Lyndon Johnson signed an early otherwise toothless version of the Endangered Species Act. With the money that signature freed, the service did something it had never done before: it hired a group of field biologists and sent them out to study the plight of four of the nation’s rarest life-forms. One man was assigned to the black-footed ferret and another to the Everglades kite. A third was sent to Hawaii to report on several rare plants and animals.

  The fourth assignment was condors. Hardly anyone applied. Eventually, it went to Sibley, who trained at Cornell University and was employed at the time by the Smithsonian Institution. When Sibley learned of the condor job, he was working on an island in the South Pacific, catching and banding albatross. When he heard that there’d been very few applicants, he called Fish and Wildlife to ask them why. Sibley says he was told that many had declined to apply because the job required expert climbing skills, which Sibley did not have. He applied anyway—and was quickly offered the job.

  “I didn’t hear the real reason there weren’t many applicants until later,” he said. “Turns out nobody wanted Alden Miller ruining their career.”

  Alden Miller died of a heart attack before Sibley got to California. When he died, Ian McMillan took his place on a scientific advisory committee formed to monitor Sibley’s work. At the first meeting of this committee, Sibley laid out an extremely ambitious plan to assess and rank the threats to the condor’s existence. First, he would find every current and former nest cave in the condor’s range. Stray feathers, eggshell bits, and scrapings of feces would be collected at every opportunity, so that they could be tested for signs of malnutrition and poisoning from pesticides. Maps of distribution and abundance would be drawn up and updated. Attempts to count the condors would be staged on an annual basis. Birds would be organized. Koford’s claim that the condor was allergic to humans would be put to the test.