Condor Read online

  The Santa Barbara spill of 1969 was the first spill to be nationally televised. Afterward, especially in California, environmental activism surged, and plans to dam the Sespe Creek no longer had a chance in hell.

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  CONTINGENCIES

  Richard Nixon saved the California condor on December 26, 1973, when he signed the modern version of the U.S. Endangered Species Act into law. Whether Mr. Nixon gave a damn about endangered species will ever be an open question. After all, he had tried to weaken the bill as it made its way through Congress. But those attempts had failed, and the president needed a law he could brag about. And so he signed the version of the ESA that is now one of the country’s most loved and most hated environmental laws.

  Compared to the declawed version of the ESA of 1967, the new Endangered Species Act was potentially smilodonian, in the sense that it had long, sharp teeth that could do lots of damage. This was the version of the ESA that made it a federal offense to “take” an endangered plant or animal, and that word “take” had been defined to cover a huge range of human actions. You could still shoot a grizzly bear if it kicked down the front door of your house, but you couldn’t fill a ditch with a rare animal living in it unless the feds came out and gave you the okay. Regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Marine Fisheries Service were part of the picture, too: they had to examine and sign off on plans to build dams on rivers that might be used by rare kinds of salmon.

  When plants and animals were added to the federal endangered species list, certain things were supposed to happen quickly. Federal biologists were legally bound to charge into the field and decide which parts of the animal’s range were absolutely crucial, potentially crucial, and so on. Regulators had to draw bright lines around the so-called critical habitat. People in the field were to get to work on plans to “recover” rare species, which basically meant building up populations until the rare plant or animal could survive on its own.

  The ESA gave the biologists sixty days to map these “critical” habitats, which often meant they had to guess at where the forage lands should be, or at where the most important breeding grounds were found. It was assumed that most of these new “critical habitats” would not be large.

  But when it was announced that the California condor would be the first to have its territory marked, the stakes got much, much higher. This was a bird whose recent range included almost all of California, and whose not-so-recent range stretched from Canada well into Baja California. Which parts of that range were the essential feeding grounds? Were there any nests on private land? What sorts of developments would spell the condor’s doom, if the bird was not already past saving?

  There were lots of questions just like that one now. For example, could spreading suburbs be blamed for the condor’s continuing slide? What about the spreading smog? What about the hunters? What about the loggers and miners and the nudist hikers who threw rocks at the birds to make them fly?

  What exactly was the condor’s problem anyway? When work on the first Endangered Species Recovery Plan began in 1973, that question hadn’t been answered. For all the work done by Koford and Sibley, guesses at the causes of the bird’s decline were still just guesses, and the leading guesses varied wildly. Ian and Eben McMillan blamed a widely used squirrel-killing poison called Compound 1080, even though they never found a trace of the poison in the carcass of a condor. Farmers who had carpet-bombed their crops with DDT were also viewed as suspects, even though DDT killed eggs of birds that ate live prey, and not the scavenging condors.

  The job of turning arguments into a legally defensible document fell to Sandy Wilbur, a genial and quietly relentless biologist labeled as “God’s condor man.”

  Sandy Wilbur says he used to be a scientist who believed in evolution. Then one day in the 1950s, Wilbur read a book by C. S. Lewis and decided to be born again. From that point on he became a scientist and a creationist: not the kind of detail I’d normally note, but in Wilbur’s case it made a difference. Not because it influenced his work on the first recovery plan; Wilbur’s beliefs gave him a reason to do that work.

  A story on the Internet started me down this path of inquiry. Somebody had e-mailed me a reprint from a magazine called World Wide Challenge, published by the Campus Crusade for Christ. “Sanford ‘Sandy’ Wilbur is God’s condor man,” read the first line of this story. “He looks upon his work as God’s call to preserve this species.”

  The author of this article put Wilbur in the middle of a fight over what a condor is. Is it a bird that “must be moved aside to allow for ‘economic growth’?” How about a relic bird that “serves no useful purpose” and is too expensive to maintain? Could condors be “haunting symbols of life itself?”

  In the middle of this battle stands God’s condor man. He offers a different but surprisingly simple reason for his motivation and for his efforts to save the bird: “God didn’t make any mistakes in what he put here to begin with,” says Sandy. “He made sure that in the Great Flood everything was preserved. I don’t see any reason why we should do less. I see helping to save condors as doing the work of the Lord.”1

  I’d already set up an interview with Wilbur when I read the piece. When we got started, I asked him if he’d mind explaining why his job was “the work of the Lord.” Wouldn’t it have been more reverential to leave the condors to their fate? Did he ever feel like he was “playing God” when he tried to change the condor’s world? Did he mind me asking?

  “No,” he said, “not at all.” Wilbur then explained that he’d been fascinated by the condor since he was growing up in Oakland. When Koford’s work was published, he was only twelve, but he read all about it in the papers. “I was fascinated by the condor’s rarity and its size,” Wilbur said. “And by the fact that it had once lived in my backyard.” Years later, when Wilbur was a federal biologist in Georgia, he heard that Sibley had quit, and applied for Sibley’s job. “We prayed about it as a family,” Wilbur explained. “It was a special opportunity and a very special trust.”

  Wilbur thought saving condors was a good job for a serious Christian. First of all, he’d be working for a cause with no particular significance beyond “taking care of something God made.”

  “Saving the condor didn’t really benefit anybody,” Wilbur said. “This was one of those rare cases where losing a species wouldn’t be a great blow to any ecosystem, since there weren’t enough of the birds to make them an important scavenger.” Wilbur said he also felt a special need to “develop a process for saving condors that emphasized cooperation, integrity, and credibility. That way we could set some standards for other preservation efforts. It was an extra bonus that my particular charge was not an obscure little-endangered spider running around a sand dune somewhere, but was a giant, majestic, unique, folklorish and controversial bird.”

  Wilbur felt “shocked and thrilled” when he was picked to replace Fred Sibley in the fall of 1969, even though he knew if he stuck around long enough, he might see the birds become extinct. Few endangered species had a range that covered half the state of California, or such a long and ominous list of potential threats to its existence, or such a short and inconclusive list of proven threats to its existence. Making matters worse was the glacial rate at which the birds replaced themselves.

  “If you did to a duck what we did to the condor you’d have about as many ducks today as we [had] in 1800,” he said. “The condor, on the other hand, was essentially a species with no built-in mortality factors except old age and the occasional accident. With a reproductive cut that even under pristine conditions could do little more than ensure that the breeding pairs replaced themselves sometime during their lifetimes, each loss to shooting, to poison, to being caught in a trap, to flying into a power line, to having an egg taken was enough to tip the scales against the species.”

  Wilbur tried to slow the condor’s slide for most of the 1970s. He wasn’t able to do it with the tools he had at hand. Activists such as Davi
d Brower got mad when Wilbur challenged the McMillan brothers, dismissing as hearsay the notion that the birds were being killed by a widely used squirrel poison. The activists got madder still when Wilbur said the condors might be having trouble finding food. Grazing lands were shrinking and ranchers seemed less inclined to leave cattle carcasses where they fell. As these ranchers hauled condor food off to dumps and incinerators, the birds themselves were forced to spend more time finding food and less time eating it. Wilbur also thought the birds were laying fewer eggs and bringing less food back to the caves. Fewer fledgling condors seemed to take wing each fall, and that was a problem. Breeding birds were not replacing themselves. The population was aging.

  By the time Wilbur sat down to write the first official California Condor Recovery plan in the middle of the 1970s, a reproductive crisis appeared to be at hand. Old-fashioned efforts to preserve the bird were failing, he’d decided. Soon it would be time to take some much more drastic steps.

  Wilbur defined these drastic steps in a Contingency Plan attached to the recovery plan, which was then sent out for public comment. Hands-off activists were pleased by Wilbur’s calls for restrictions on hunting, logging, mining, road building, and drilling, and by the urgency with which he insisted that the government buy private lands surrounding roost sites. Wilbur also emphasized the need to learn much more about the possible impacts of common pesticides and poisons.2

  But the activists were outraged by the “last-ditch” actions outlined in Wilbur’s attachment. If all else failed, every condor left in the world would be trapped and placed in holding pens, where they would be handled and bled. Nine of these birds would be shipped to “captive propagation facilities,” one of which would be in San Diego. Some of the other birds would be released with experimental radio tracking devices bolted onto their tails and big numbered ID tags attached to their wings. Field biologists would track and plot the movements of the bugged birds, learning crucial things about the way condors lived. Fights over whether they were finding enough food would be settled once and for all. Scientists would not have to guess at whether unknown condor X was old or young or male or female.3

  Some thought it was ironic that “God’s condor man” would be the author of a plan that would essentially play God with the condors. Wilbur thought the critics had it backward, though. People who refused to do what it took to save the bird were the ones who would be playing God.

  Some of the most pointed attacks on Wilbur’s plan came from Carl Koford himself. Koford hadn’t studied condors since the late 1940s, but that didn’t seem to give him pause. At hearings and in letters to elected officials, he called the Wilbur plan a dangerous experiment that was likely to destroy the species. This was a position Koford shared with David Brower, and his friend Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University.

  Ehrlich was the author of The Population Bomb, which warned that runaway population growth was wrecking the planet. He was also a regular guest on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and he stuck with Koford to the end. In a letter to the Secretary of the Interior in 1980, Ehrlich denounced the contingency plan as a terrible precedent, a waste of money. “The projected expenditures for trapping, marking and putting radio transmitters on most of the remaining condors amounts to nothing more than unconscionable and dangerous harassment,” he wrote. “Nothing of general scientific value could come from such observations that could not come from studies of birds not threatened with extinction.”

  Koford died of cancer in 1979. After a memorial service on the U.C.-Berkeley campus, Eben McMillan drove the great man’s ashes to his ranch in central California, where he threw them into the wind.

  Not long afterward, the federal government and the state of California announced that it was time to put Sandy Wilbur’s rescue plan into effect. In doing so, the regulators turned their backs on some remarkably eloquent cries of dissent from hands-off activists such as Brower, who argued that at this rate it would not be very long before travelers in Southern California would be greeted by signs along the highway that read LOS ANGELES–NEXT 250 EXITS. In an essay entitled “The Condor and a Sense of Place,” Brower wondered whether the city to the south would ever stop expanding:

  Must Paul Bunyan move to California, go into real estate and ride a giant leaping frog, leaving colossal subdivision plans at landing?…Count on Japan’s present population as the model for California’s Year 2080, and China’s for the United States as a whole; after all, we are talking about roughly the same respective areas. Such a grim future, with its coalescing cities and suburbs, will have far too little room for people and no room at all for condors.

  Koford’s written objections to the last-ditch plans were read aloud at public hearings held before key votes. “If condors are not surviving well in the wild,” he had written in an essay, “should we expect released cage-raised birds to do better? In the wild they must forage skillfully, know the landscape and air currents, seek appropriate shelter at night and in storms, cope with aggressive eagles and compete with established condors. All poultry breeders know the difficulties of adding to an established flock a new bird: it is generally rejected and killed. Must we further dilute the natural scene by mishandling the birds and injecting cage-raised stock into condor society?” Koford ends this essay by insisting that a “cage-raised” condor could never be more than a “partial replicate” of the real thing, adding that “If we cannot preserve condors wild through understanding their environmental relations, we have already lost the battle.”

  Words like those did a lot to influence public opinion, but by the late seventies, they didn’t seem to carry much weight with relevant federal and state officials. This was true in part because the hands-off point of view had been officially considered and rejected by a panel of prominent wildlife experts called in to do a “scientific audit” of the recovery plan.

  “The existence of the California condor depends on conscientious human intervention,” read the panel’s final report. “This will always be so. The only reasonable hope for achieving a large population of condors in the wild is captive propagation.”4

  When the scientific panel dismissed arguments put forward by Brower and his allies as “vacuous,” Wilbur said he felt both vindicated and enormously relieved. And yet, not long afterward, Wilbur said, he was unexpectedly reassigned to a job in Sacramento. A new team of biologists was coming in to carry out the last-ditch rescue plan, and they didn’t want Wilbur’s input.

  Photographic Inserts

  The condor known as AC-9 or Igor watched trapper Pete Bloom catch several of the last wild condors from the top of a nearby tree. Igor himself was trapped on Easter Sunday, 1987. (Photo by Dave Clendenen; courtesy of Peter Bloom)

  In 1986 and 1987, the last free-flying California condors were trapped by biologists like Peter Bloom (pictured) of the National Audubon Society and Dave Clendenen of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (Peter Bloom)

  After World War II, the range of the condor followed this wishbone-shaped set of mountains. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

  When creatures like the saber-toothed cat and the mastodon were alive, the California condor ranged across large parts of North America. (Knight Mural of Pleistocene Life, Rancho La Brea Tar Pits #4948 courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History)

  Indian tribes in California revered the birds and left paintings of condors on rocks. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

  “I believed this to be the largest bird in North America,” wrote Lewis in his journal in 1806; Clark wrote the same thing and added a rough sketch of the bird’s head. (Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society)

  Hundreds of years after Lewis and Clark explored the Columbia River, condors were returned to the Vermillion cliffs and the Grand Canyon. (Christie Van Cleve)

  In 1840, John James Audubon immortalized the “California Vulture” in “The Birds of America.” (Courtesy of Haley and Steele)

  By the early 1900s, hunters and egg collecto
rs had all but wiped the species out. (Photo by R. Corado; courtesy of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology)

  Joseph P. Grinnell, a legendary naturalist, was among the first to describe the bird as a “symbol of our lessening wilderness.” (Courtesy of the Bankroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

  In 1939, Carl Koford was the first to study the behavior of wild condors and urged hunters, loggers, hikers, photographers, and scientists to stay away from the species. (Courtesy of Rolf R. Koford)

  At times, Koford and some of his friends handled condors in their nest caves. Koford later denounced the “hands-on” approach as a threat to the future of the species (Ed Harrison, above). (Photo by Carl Koford; courtesy of Lloyd Kiff)

  In the desperate 1980s, when ravens were seen breaking condor eggs and eating the contents, biologists like Rob Ramey shot at birds that approached the nest caves. (Courtesy of Rob Roy Ramey II)

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  By the 1980s, almost all of the remaining wild condors had been trapped at least once, and most had numbered ID tags and radio transmitters hanging from the front of their wings. (Christie Van Cleve)

  In 1987, the last wild condor was captured and taken to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. (Courtesy of the Zoological Society of San Diego)