Condor Read online

  Ogden’s plan was endorsed by the board of the National Audubon Society and by the Washington office of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Snyder’s was endorsed by the California Department of Fish and Game, the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos, and several prominent geneticists.

  “That’s when it really got ugly,” said Jesse Grantham, who remained an ally of John Ogden’s. “People started locking their doors at the offices in Ventura about then. People on opposite sides of the fight turned away when they passed in the hall.”

  Ogden and Snyder seemed to spend a lot of time on the phone to Washington, with Ogden speaking mostly to Snyder’s supervisors at a federal wildlife research center in Patuxent, Maryland, and Snyder attempting to go over their heads by sending messages directly to the director of Fish and Wildlife. Snyder had been ordered to stop holding public hearings, and staff morale had fallen through the floor. Interim director Mike Scott brought in a team of psychiatrists. “My only rule in situations like those is ‘thou shalt not sandbag,’” Scott said. “But when I joined the program I saw it happening all the time.”

  Snyder had a strong scientific case and no support from Washington. That case got much stronger when an extremely sick condor turned up in the foothills of the Sierra range. A delegation of veterinarians and ornithologists was sent out to investigate; the bird died shortly after they arrived. “One of the vets was holding it in his arms,” Grantham said. “He told me he could see the light going out in the bird’s eyes.”

  The political logjam broke in August 1995, when a dead condor was found on a ranch in southwest Kern County.

  This condor had been half of the Santa Barbara breeding pair, which had just produced two healthy eggs in 1985. After it was found, the Washington office of the Fish and Wildlife Service approved an “emergency” plan to trap all of the remaining birds. Audubon did not give up the fight right away: the organization went to court to stop the trapping. Peter Berle, Audubon’s new president, told reporters that the suit was filed because the trapping decision was “unilateral, was not supported by the administrative record, and was made by officials in Washington, who did not consult with their own scientific staff.” A federal court agreed, blocking all forms of condor trapping.

  More ugliness followed when a condor known as AC-3 was captured and tested for lead poisoning. When the tests came back, they showed that AC-3 had potentially lethal levels of lead in her blood. The court decision forced the recovery team to release AC-3 into the wild. She was sure to die if the ban remained in place. Audubon may have suspected a trick; they refused to back down. After that, Marsha Hobbs held a press conference at the zoo. She declared that Audubon now had “blood on their hands.” 7

  Peter Berle was appalled by these remarks. In a long, angry press release, he noted that Audubon had been fighting to save the condor for almost fifty years; he added that it was Audubon that originally called for the creation of a breeding program.

  Today’s actions by Ms. Hobbs and the Zoo Association confirm reservations Audubon has had all along about the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association—basically that it is more concerned with exploiting the birds and the recovery program to enhance its public and political standing than it is with saving condors…clearly, Audubon’s longtime stake in this effort—scientific, financial and emotional—is too great to sit idly by and watch the condor become extinct.

  Opposition to the trapping plan collapsed when the lawsuit was thrown out of court. That put an end to the injunction that had forced the trappers to unhand the birds.

  twelve

  ZOO

  The condor in the kennel behind the front seat of the single-engine Cessna was alive and alert when the plane touched down at the small rural airport near the eastern edge of San Diego County. Don Sterner, a veterinarian at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, moved the kennel holding Igor to the front seat of his beat-up red Isuzu. Then he laid a blanket over the top of the kennel, hoping it would help keep Igor calm. During the windy drive to the park, Sterner kept raising the blanket slightly to peek into the kennel at Igor. By the time the Trooper reached the captive breeding compound behind the park, rumors of the taking of the last wild condor had begun to ricochet around the world. Reporters who’d been told that Igor was in San Diego were calling the zoo to ask for every last detail. Meanwhile, activists who’d threatened to “liberate” the bird were converging on the Los Angeles Zoo, having been led to believe that Igor was there.1

  The guard waved Sterner through the big metal gates. After pulling up near the quarantine pen, he and a colleague slid the kennel out of the pickup, set it on the ground, and paused. If something was going to go wrong it would happen here, Sterner thought to himself. The door on this kennel was secured by eight metal latches that did not open easily, and when big birds rushed out too quickly, they’d been known to hurt themselves. A broken wing now would have the activists storming the gates of the compound. Condors also had a history of trying to make a break for it after scrambling out of kennels, doubling back into the faces of the keepers at the entrances to the pens. Lower on the list of concerns was the strong probability that Igor would try to bite off Sterner’s fingers when he reached down to open the latches.

  Another vet diverted the condor by pushing one of his boots up against the side of the plastic kennel. Almost instantly Igor’s beak shot out between the metal bars, ripping into one of the leather-covered toes. Sterner got the latches open and started to pull on the door. Igor didn’t let him to finish the job.

  “It was like POW! and he was out of there,” said Sterner. “He bounces into the quarantine pen, jumps up onto a perch, turns around to face us and freezes.” The air sacs near his neck were all puffed out, and the skin on Igor’s head and neck was bright, bright red. Every now and then the bird would jerk his head in the direction of a sound, only to end up looking at the plywood walls.

  Igor couldn’t see the other condors, but I’ll bet he knew they were there. A guttural hiss from beyond the wall is all it would have taken, or maybe the stomping ruckus of a short mock charge. When the bird looked up he would have seen the sky on the other side of the thick black mesh stretched across the top of the pen. Clouds and tiny birds would have passed overhead, through his narrow field of vision. What an odd sight that must have been for him.

  Igor was furious and terrified, and with good reason: in a matter of hours, his colossal range had shrunk to four hundred square feet. The pens that held the other breeding birds were bigger than that, but Igor was in quarantine, and the quarantine pen was twenty feet long by twenty feet wide. Giant wings and telescopic eyes were not going to do him any good in here.

  On the other hand, Igor was alive, which is more than you could say for many of the condors he’d grown up with. “If we’d have left him out, he would have died,” said Sterner. “There’s no doubt about it. He would have eaten something full of lead pellets or pulled on a coyote trap and gotten blasted with cyanide, or been shot by somebody who didn’t want him around. Or maybe it would be something we don’t know about yet. We lost a lot of condors in the late eighties, and some of them just disappeared.”

  Sterner left Igor alone until the condor looked hungry. The bird’s first meal was a processed loaf of horsemeat mixed with vitamins, bone, and odd bits of hair. Sterner then checked the bird’s health, measuring body temperature, heart rate, and breaths per minute, and then picked through the feathers for lice. He soon looked up into the bird’s nostrils and felt around inside the beak. Igor’s blood would be tested for a huge range of abnormalities and toxins. If everything checked out okay, he’d be moved to a flight pen in thirty days.

  “Condors are resilient birds,” Sterner said. “They have to be, given what they eat. But they do get sick and listless, and we didn’t want to let that in. We didn’t need a virus running around in the captive flock, especially now. That could have been disastrous.”

  When Igor arrived at the San Diego Wild Animal Park on April 19, 1987, there were twenty-seven
California condors left on Earth. Thirteen birds were living at the captive center in Los Angeles; the others were in San Diego. “We didn’t have much of a population to work with,” Sterner said. “We didn’t know a lot about how the birds were related to each other. We were going to have to do some wild guessing when we put the first breeding pairs together. Basically, we’d be grabbing the females and putting them in with the males and hoping for the best.”

  California condor eggs had been hatched at these zoos when Igor was carried in the door, but none of the captive birds had ever tried to breed. Sterner and his colleagues were fairly sure it would happen eventually, but there were a lot of ifs. If the birds were all first cousins, the species was probably doomed; if the so-called crucial “founder birds” refused to breed, the species was definitely doomed. Sterner didn’t know whether any of the birds were too old to breed or infertile. With only fourteen breeding pairs, he’d need a lot of luck.

  At the Los Angeles Zoo, the situation was the same, except for the question of what to do with the condor known as Topa Topa. This was the bird Fred Sibley captured twice in the Sespe Sanctuary in the late 1960s, when it was refusing to eat and barely able to fly. At the Los Angeles Zoo, Topa Topa had been terrorizing keepers and other animals since the moment it arrived, and it now lived in isolation. “I don’t think he knew he was a condor,” said Mike Wallace, the man in charge of the L.A. breeding program. “He was always displaying to the keepers and they were encouraging it, because they thought it was special to be so close. If he wasn’t in the mood to display, they stayed the hell away from him, because he was extremely aggressive. You could send a keeper in there with a net and Topa Topa would take it away from him. He was one angry bird.” Wallace had made it a personal goal to see little Topa Topas brought into the world, but by 1987, all the other vulture experts thought he was wasting his time. The bird was old enough to feel the need to strut around in front of females, but when Wallace took his job in 1985, the females Topa Topa liked to strut for weren’t condors, and some weren’t even female.

  In his years at the Los Angeles Zoo, Topa Topa had shared pen space with a lot of birds and animals, but never with another condor. When other California condors began arriving in the 1980s, Topa Topa was kept apart. “We didn’t know what he would do,” said Wallace. “And we couldn’t risk losing a potential breeding bird.” Wallace had a hunch that this was especially unfortunate from a genetic point of view, since Topa Topa had been taken out of the wild. He thought it possible that Topa Topa’s genes were very different from the genes of the other captive condors, and in the long run, those differences could prove crucial. Topa Topa might turn out to be the only bird immune to a dreaded disease, or a condor that lacked a dormant but potentially deadly gene.

  Wallace was encouraged to collect some of Topa Topa’s sperm and try to use it to fertilize an egg inside another California condor. But vultures are notoriously unresponsive to that procedure, and Wallace didn’t feel like giving up yet. “I told [the recovery team] I wanted to put a young Andean female condor in with Topa, and when they agreed, I went ahead and did it before anybody could change their mind.”

  As expected, Topa Topa flew right at the Andean, trying to intimidate it as he intimidated people. “He was going to fly right into her face and bite it,” Wallace said, but the Andean stood her ground and watched Topa Topa come at her for a moment, seemingly frozen in place, and when the attacker was too close to change his course, she turned aside, so that Topa Topa sailed past her into a plywood corner. Wallace said the female then turned around and “beat the crap” out of her aggressor. “What I realized was that, wow, he knows a lot about how to manipulate people who come into his pen, but he knows nothing about his own species.” Wallace left the birds together for a couple of days to see whether anything would change, but nothing did. Topa Topa kept attacking and the Andean kept ducking out of the way, and when she needed to, she’d whack him with her beak, feet, and wings. “When he cornered her, she just thrashed him,” Wallace said. “I don’t think he ever touched her. After four days I was worried he would begin to get nervous about being around his own kind, so we pulled her out of there.” Then he tried to make a different plan.

  In 1987, the people who ran the nation’s zoos weren’t sure they wanted geneticists such as Oliver Ryder around. If they were, it was assumed that they would stay away from press conferences at which zoo directors bragged about the birth of the latest “pure” albino tiger cub, or the thirty-seventh chimp pumped out by the same set of adults. Those kinds of announcements may have thrilled the public, but they tended to infuriate Ryder, who tends to speak his mind.

  “I’ll give you an example,” Ryder said when I met him in his office in the back of what had once been the morgue at the San Diego Zoo. “When AC-9 arrived at the Wild Animal Park in 1987, there was a big debate going on about the purpose of captive breeding programs. Zoo directors loved it when famous animals made babies, and that was all some of them wanted to know about. They didn’t want to spend the extra time and money it was going to take to develop genetically useful breeding programs. They just wanted to talk about how cute the little critters were.”

  Ryder was one of the first to tell these zoo directors why they had to stop the nonsense. He was among the first “conservation geneticists” hired in the early 1980s, when the San Diego Zoological Society opened a research facility called the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, or CRES. When I first met Ryder in the late 1980s, CRES had already established itself as a world-class center for animal research. Projects under way in the former morgue ranged from the creation of an aluminum water bed for pregnant mammals, to the installation of hormone pumps in animals with breeding problems. Scientific papers reported on the pathology, virology, endocrinology, behavior, and genetic diversity of a wide range of very rare animals.

  In the late eighties, molecular geneticists weren’t always media-friendly. But Ryder was, and is. Television crews were always dropping in at CRES to film the fog of liquid nitrogen that poured from the top of what Ryder called the “frozen zoo”—three metal tanks full of semen, egg, and tissue samples taken from endangered animals and stored in a supercharged freezer.

  “Three hundred fifty species,” he said as we watched the fog. “Three hundred eighty-five degrees below zero. Fahrenheit.”

  “What got you into this line of work?” I later asked, walking back to his office. Earlier that day, one of the other conservation geneticists at CRES had cracked a bitter-sounding joke about how rich he’d be if he’d taken his mother’s advice and studied the human genome.

  “I was a stamp collector when I was a kid, and when the postal service put out a condor stamp, I thought it was very cool. After that my parents used to drive me up to Griffith Park to see the condor at the L.A. Zoo. The zoo wasn’t much to look at in those days—I don’t remember much besides the cages and the carousel—but there was this one cage that had a condor in it, and it was Topa Topa.”

  Ryder interrupted himself to dig around inside a small refrigerator. Eventually he pulled out a tiny glass vial and handed it to me. “Look,” he said. “California condor DNA, in a gel. I’ve got the DNA of every living condor in the world in this refrigerator, and from many of the dead ones. When we look at that gel, we see patterns of bands that tell us all kinds of things.”

  I gave the vial a studious look, lamely attempting to hide the fact that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Then I handed the vial back to Dr. Ryder, who returned it to the refrigerator. This was what the condor was in 1987—bits of DNA in vials lined up in a fridge that belonged in a college dorm room.

  “The lines look a little like bar codes,” he explained. “When you compare them you find out how related the individuals are. It’s a complicated process that involves the use of mathematical algorithms that in my warmest moments I can only come close to understanding, but the basic idea behind the math is that you want to come in and count the band-sharing
while giving extra attention to the anomalous bands. When you find a bunch of bar codes with the same irregularities, it’s likely that you’re looking at condors with a common ancestor, a shared line of descent.”

  Over the course of the next few years, this kind of work would become routine, and not just at the zoos. Lawyers would be throwing around phrases like “shared anomalies” in bitter paternity disputes; eventually historians would join the fray. According to Ryder, it was the presence of an odd snip at the end of a long string of Y-chromosomes that proved that Thomas Jefferson made babies with one of his slaves. But that all lay ahead in the 1980s, when Ryder and a colleague set out to measure the genetic relatedness of the last of the California condors. Back then, nobody had ever done this kind of work before. As a result, fights over whether zoos should breed for numbers or genetic diversity didn’t make much difference in the end. Without a family tree to refer to, zookeepers could only guess at whether breeding pairs were totally unrelated, barely related, closely related, or ridiculously inbred.

  Ryder and a colleague made those arguments matter when they found a way to draw the missing family trees. The condor project needed this breakthrough; when it was done, the future of the species seemed a little brighter than it had before. According to the bar codes, the last surviving condors hadn’t bred much with cousins, siblings, parents, or close relatives, and this raised the odds that the condor genome was in pretty good shape. It probably wasn’t full of recessive genes that worked like hidden time bombs set to blow up somewhere down the line, triggering killer diseases and severe deformities.