Condor Page 16
Snyder said the answer came to him when ornithologist Eric Johnson of California Polytechnical State University at San Luis Obispo brought a group of students up into the mountains to photograph the birds. When he saw their pictures, he noticed that some birds had broken feathers on their wings; others had feathers that were merely bent or molting. If someone were to organize a mass photography session in the condor’s rangelands, those photographs could be studied and sorted into piles, one pile per bird. If Snyder were to count the piles he would know how many birds were left. If there were a lot of them, captive breeding programs wouldn’t seem quite so essential. If there were only a few, it would be the other way around.
Snyder and Johnson started handing out cameras to every reliable observer they knew. Not long afterward, towering stacks of condor pictures filled Snyder’s office. Some of the pictures showed birds with telltale scars on their heads. All the other clues were in the wings. Photographs taken in the course of a day were laid out on a map drawn on the floor of Snyder’s office, so that Snyder and Johnson could trace the flight paths of individual birds. After several weeks of sorting, the two men concluded that as of the summer of 1982, there were no more than twenty-four and no fewer than twenty-one California condors left on Earth.
The fact that the birds had finally been counted was what Snyder called the good news. The count itself confirmed his fears. When Snyder staged a second count in 1983, the total was even more depressing: that time he ended up with twenty-two piles of photographs. “These data…indicate a continuing catastrophic decline of the species,” he and Eric Johnson later wrote. “In the absence of intense conservation measures, extinction of the wild population can be expected in 10–20 years.”
While the photographic census was under way, the field teams kept on watching the birds, which was not an easy thing to do. “Everybody burned out eventually, but some people seemed to have a gift,” said Helen Snyder. “Some people could sit and watch nonstop for weeks, and some went nuts after just a few days. Most people lasted about five days before they started missing things. After that it turned into, ‘Gee I’d like a beer,’ or, ‘I wonder what my girlfriend is doing,’ or, ‘I could be in Santa Barbara right now.’”
One researcher never seemed to want to leave his home in the wild. He was Jon Schmitt, a line artist, careful note-taker, and accomplished taxidermist. “Jon would sit there all day every day for a month at a time,” said Helen Snyder. “And none of his field notes ever missed a beat. I don’t know how he did it, but it never seemed to bother him. He’s the guy who saw the golden eagle try to kill the chick at the entrance to the cave.”
Schmitt told me he’d be happy to describe the attack once he reviewed his field notes. He didn’t want to mix it up with any of the dozens of other condor-eagle episodes he’d seen while sitting in the blinds. Some of these encounters were halfhearted eagle attacks designed to push condors out of choice thermals. Other attacks were so relentless and aggressive that they ended with the condor lying on the ground or hiding in a cave.
Schmitt said he knew there was an eagle on the way when he saw descending condors looking backward over their shoulders. Anything below a diving golden eagle is in trouble, but Schmitt said the condors had their defenses up. Once he watched a condor fleeing from an eagle that was shooting down out of the clouds, gradually increasing its angle of descent. “By the time the eagle and the condor were in the same optical field of view they were falling almost vertically,” he said. “Both had their wings drawn close in and their flight feathers were swept back.”
Schmitt heard “a loud shrill tearing sound” as the birds shot past, even though they were three hundred yards away. “The condor is falling hard and fast, but the eagle is so much faster. It closes the distance swiftly, and just when I thought contact had been made, the condor deftly rolls over, briefly flying upside down.” The anchor-shaped eagle sheared harmlessly past the suddenly inverted vulture; almost instantly, it vaulted up, “like it had bounced off of some kind of invisible surface.” Golden eagles like to stay above their prey, and this one wasn’t taking any chances. Schmitt said it rose almost vertically, several hundred feet up into the air in a matter of seconds.
The eagle thought the condor would attempt to keep pace, but by then the condor was gone. Schmitt said he saw it blasting forward just above the ground, entering a forest of fir trees that tapered out near a popular roost site. Schmitt couldn’t see the roost site, but he figured that that’s where the condor ended up. Even golden eagles are hard-pressed to cope with several condors at once. The eagle flew over the horizon toward the roost site, Schmitt said, but a few minutes later it flew away, chased by heckling ravens.
Eagles also tried to get at fledglings. Schmitt saw this on two occasions, one of which began when a golden eagle dove on a squirrel that managed to escape. Schmitt was in a blind about a quarter-mile off, looking at the back of the eagle, when he saw it lean horizontally forward with its wings pressed slightly outward. “It was weaving its head from side to side, triangulating the distance to its next intended victim. I was looking over the eagle’s shoulder at a helpless condor chick, which for some imbecilic reason had chosen this moment to walk out to the front of a cave on the far side of a gorge.” The eagle took off and headed straight for the chick, which never seemed to see it coming. But at the last second, the eagle was knocked off course by a dive-bombing parent condor.
Schmitt was in the same blind when an eagle crashed down into a condor that was feeding a chick. He said the chick bounced into the cave while the adult turned around to face the eagle, which was lying on its back with its talons pointed up into the air. “Wings flailing and audibly slapping and scraping rock, the condor is standing on the eagle, furiously tearing at the eagle’s breast and throwing clumps of feathers to the side; the eagle is ripping at the condor with its long legs and huge talons.” When the eagle broke free and attacked again, the birds pushed each other off the cliff. Both took flight before hitting the ground. Schmitt said the eagle flew away.
Everyone on the field staff had stories to tell. Some had found Indian burial sites. Some had discovered very old guns. Many saw fighter jets from Vandenberg Air Force Base chasing low-flying missiles up the canyons. “Nonflapping entities” were not supposed to drop lower than three thousand feet above the Sespe, but that rule was frequently ignored.
The speed with which the missiles and the planes roared through appeared to freak the condors out, as did the sonic booms they left behind as calling cards. Condor watchers saw the birds leap up off their eggs when they heard these booms. Every now and then a soaring condor would be rocked by the winds bouncing off a passing fighter.
Snyder and his team were out in force when a space shuttle passed through the refuge on its way to Edwards Air Force Base on July 4, 1982. The boom that trailed those rockets made the roar of the missiles and the fighter planes sound like a mild summer breeze. Snyder said his colleagues saw a parent bird explode out of a nest cave as the shuttle passed, rushing forward in a way that made it look a little like a giant feathered cannonball.
Snyder and Ogden requested that the Navy ask its pilots to fly higher. They also urged NASA to bring their space shuttles down in Florida when the condors were tending to their eggs. To prove the need for these actions, Snyder and Ogden sent a package of photographs. One of them was taken just before an unarmed cruise missile crashed into the ground near the condor’s breeding grounds; Jon Schmitt was the one who saw it happen. He’d learned to identify different kinds of missiles when he saw one waver and angle down in the spring of 1983. “I saw a puff of smoke before it fell into a canyon,” Schmitt said. “At that point it was out of sight.” Schmitt said the escort jets sailed forward over the tops of the mountains before turning back toward the canyon adjacent to the one that held the wreckage. Apparently unaware that they were looking in the wrong place, the fighter jets circled briefly and then left the area. Schmitt said he called the Forest Service on his walkie-talk
ie then, asking them to tell the Air Force where the missile was. A few minutes later the Forest Service passed a pair of messages back: First, the Air Force was aware of an “incident” that may or may not have involved a missile. Second, it did not need his help.
Shortly after that, a huge black military helicopter thundered forward, buzzing what may have been an occupied nest cave on its way up the wrong valley. Schmitt called the Forest Service a second time, asking that his message again be relayed to the Air Force. The Forest Service passed back a less polite version of the last set of messages. The helicopter looked around and flew away. Later, the Forest Service called back to ask Schmitt to repeat his earlier directions. The military helicopter came back the next day to remove the wreckage of the drone.
By the time Schmitt saw the crash of the cruise missile, the contingency team had its trapping permits back. Snyder’s team was taking eggs from breeding pairs and giving them to the zoos. Ogden’s team was laying out carcasses and chasing after condors that had radio tracking devices bolted to their wings. Snyder himself was following the tagged birds around in an airplane, picking up data points that he described as “nothing short of spectacular.” Ogden said he watched the condors shadowing cattle herds during the calving season and then doing the same to deer hunters for the hunting season. He saw them soar on unseen winds for hundreds of miles at a time. He saw them stay away from logging operations on specific peaks, and noticed that some of the most traveled routes crossed mostly private land.
Ogden and Snyder were now fighting on a more or less constant basis. By some accounts they fought over control of the program, but by others they just didn’t get along. The precedent-setting partnership between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Audubon Society was splitting into warring factions, with Ogden and the radio trackers on one side and Snyder and the field teams on the other. The split became a literal one when Snyder started running his half of the recovery team out of his home in Ojai, all but abandoning the Ventura office space he shared with Ogden.
For a time the only thing that kept these fights in check was the crushing load of fieldwork being done by each of the field teams. Ogden’s crew was busy dragging carcasses around and chasing after condors wearing radio tags. Snyder’s half worked so ridiculously hard out in the field that it’s a wonder they’re all still alive.
They called themselves “the zombie patrol,” because that’s what they often looked like when they staggered toward the condor nest caves—filthy, smelly, bleeding, starving, stiff, and utterly exhausted. Noel Snyder marched in the front of his group, carrying a pair of antiseptic gloves and a black padded suitcase that seemed to double as a good luck talisman: in the 1960s, other field biologists had used this case to carry whooping crane eggs off to captive breeding centers. Since condor eggs were roughly the same size as crane eggs, Snyder had the case sent to him when the permits came through that allowed him to take condor eggs. “It had thermometers sticking out of the top so we could make sure the eggs were warm enough,” he said. “We were out there carrying this suitcase through the brush, which must have looked very strange.”
Snyder was allowed to bring the lucky black suitcase out again in 1982, after he watched that pair of condors double-clutch to produce a second egg. Late in the summer of 1983, the field teams staked out every active nest they knew about. When the breeders laid their first set of eggs, the zombie patrol moved in, fording raging rivers, climbing vertical cliffs, cutting trails with chain saws, and clearing helipads in the middle of the night.
As soon as the team had the staging area all set up, Snyder and the pickup crew would climb up to the nest cave. When they got there, one of the researchers would tell a long, sick joke, in hopes that the sound of a human voice would lure the condors off the eggs and out of the caves. The joke was always told in a low voice, so as not to startle the birds: panicked condors might have crushed an egg on the way out.
The joke is too sick to bear repeating, but it worked every time. Parent birds sitting in caves rose and ambled forward like old folks in slippers shuffling out to get the Sunday paper. Snyder moved in behind the birds when the path to an egg was clear. Someone always followed him in with the incubator suitcase. Condors were expected to hiss and fly away. When they didn’t, Snyder’s colleague kept the parent birds away.
In 1983 and 1984, Snyder and the zombie patrol delivered a total of twelve condor eggs to the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos. Nine produced chicks; three never made it, though the failures weren’t caused by handling.
“Nineteen eighty-four was perfect,” Snyder said. “It was like, Oh my God, we’ve got peace in the world. We had five breeding pairs out in the wild, all of the funding we needed to do the monitoring, and the egg pickups were going beautifully.” And it wasn’t just Snyder who was feeling optimistic. In the fall of 1984, the Fish and Wildlife Service made the announcement everyone was waiting for: barring an unforeseen catastrophe, two or three captive condors would be released in the summer of 1985. If those releases worked out, more condors would be leaving the zoos in the summer of 1986. “We were set to go,” Snyder said. “Everybody was optimistic, everybody was happy. We had no idea how short the moment would be.”
Audubon promoted John Ogden out of the condor program late in 1984. After moving back to Florida, he started work as Audubon’s new national director of science. Snyder and the members of the zombie patrol wished him well. Then they started getting ready to head back out into the field. When the egg-laying season began in January, they would look for the expected bumper crop to take back to the zoos, leaving the birds to double-clutch and pump out some replacements.
The first breeding pair was expected to produce an egg on January 15, 1985, based on the number of days that had passed since the birds were seen copulating. But when January 15 came, there was no sign of an egg or either of the birds. The next two eggs were due on the twentieth and the twenty-fifth of January, but on both days nothing happened. Snyder said it was at that point that he started to have a “terrible sense of impending doom.” He and his colleagues had entered the Sespe expecting to find five eggs, but so far they had nothing. Frantic searches seemed to show that four adult condors disappeared over the winter, leaving just one breeding pair to keep the species going. Snyder thought it was the death knell for the wild bird.
“We needed to trap the free-flying birds and bring them into the zoos as quickly as possible,” he said. “We had to assume that the missing birds were all now dead, and that the survivors were at risk. We had no idea what was going on out there in the wild. Leaving the birds alone would have been completely irresponsible.”
Six condors died in 1985, including one from each of the four breeding pairs. That was 40 percent of the wild population. Only one of the missing birds was wearing a radio-tracking device, and it wasn’t sending any signals. Most of the birds in captivity were now female; most of the birds left in the wild were now male. If you’d hired a group of expert marksmen and told them to doom the wild flock as efficiently as possible, these are the birds they would have hunted.
Snyder’s colleagues on the egg team shared his sense of urgency. But at first Jesse Grantham, the biologist who’d taken Ogden’s job, was not convinced a crisis was at hand. Back in New York, Grantham’s former field boss seemed to hold a more suspicious version of that point of view. According to the minutes of a closed meeting at the headquarters of the Audubon Society, John Ogden and his colleagues still thought Snyder was just after power:
The captive breeding people, strongly aided and abetted by Noel Snyder, are making this situation into a crisis and have requested that all wild condors be captured and put into zoos for “protective custody”…it is clear that this effort is designed to wrest control of the program away from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Audubon Society.
Ogden was the first to admit that the situation in the wild was extremely bleak. A single pair of condors produced a total of two eggs in the sprin
g of 1985—nowhere near enough to trigger the expected release of a zoo-bred condor—and one of the eggs had been killed by a bacterial infection. Since 1982, at least seven condors had died in the wild, and now six more were gone. One of these birds had died after being shot and poisoned, and hopes for the others were dimming every day. The minutes of the closed meeting in New York showed that no one disagreed with that: “If we have lost three or four birds from the wild population, then the number of condors now in the wild must be only eleven or twelve.”
Condor country had become a risky place for condors. Ogden knew that well. At the meeting in New York, Ogden said his radio teams had learned a lot about the habits of the wild condors, and a fair amount about what it was that might be killing them, but nowhere near enough to protect them. He saw an urgent need to learn as much as possible about the habits of the wild birds. The minutes of the meeting in New York seem to show that in the minds of the people who ran Audubon, this trumped the plan to beef up captive breeding.6
Starting immediately, increased emphasis in the field research program should be placed on very intensive surveillance of all wild condors on as near a day-to-day basis as possible to try to discover the limiting factors acting on the wild population, and for the development of a viable habitat reserve for the long-term survival of the wild population. To this end we would suggest that all wild condors be trapped and radioed in 1985.
Ogden hoped to keep the wild birds alive by feeding them at a “bait station” on the Hopper Refuge. “Although relatively little is still known about the present mortality factors, it is undeniable that two condors that died in 1983 to 1984 died from something they ate! If we do not get a handle on the problems facing the wild flock, it would seem to us that we have probably lost the species.”