Condor Read online

  “It was not what I expected,” said Mesta. “The proposal had been out for a while by then, and we hadn’t heard any serious complaints.”

  “The proposal” was a plan to return the condor to the Grand Canyon, or someplace near the boundaries of the national park. The hope was that the birds would eventually return to the caves and canyons they’d left ten thousand years ago, after the Pleistocene blitzkrieg.

  Condor experts called the reintroduction plan vital for many reasons, starting with the relatively urgent need to buy some catastrophe insurance. Horrible diseases and other freak events are always a threat to isolated groups of critically endangered species, and zoo-bred condors released in California fit that profile. By building up a second free-flying population, the condor keepers would reduce the chance of a “kill-them-all-in-one-fell-swoop” disaster event to 0.000 percent, or to a number so close to that, it wasn’t worth calculating. Simultaneous regional disasters might be enough to erase both groups of wild birds at once, but how likely could that be? When was the last time anything happened in two fell swoops?

  If you needed arguments of that sort, Mesta was your man. In California, he was known as an official who listened when other people talked, and for his ability to keep small fights from turning into big ones. Here in Arizona, he was ready to argue the case for reintroduction on any number of grounds, ranging from a surge in tourism to the need to keep the condor’s genes diverse.

  When it helped, Mesta even pulled a kind of cosmic shame card out of his uniformed sleeve, arguing that condors might still be in the canyons if it weren’t for us human hunters, and now here we are ten thousand years later with a chance to make things right. As crazy as it sounded, the people of southern Utah and northern Arizona were now in a position to make the Grand Canyon look a little bit grander. When was the last time that had happened? Putting the condor back where it belonged was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? Of course it was.

  Some of Mesta’s colleagues thought the plan was as good as approved. They’d been flying in from California for years, quietly examining a series of release sites before agreeing to set the birds free on the uppermost lip of a 1,200-foot-tall curtain of rock called the Vermilion Cliffs. This place was in Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, adjacent to the national park, but that didn’t matter to the experts. Mike Wallace remembered gazing down on these cliffs from the window of a plane and thinking, We can stop looking now, this is perfect, this is the place we want to be.

  Hearings in Phoenix and Salt Lake City had been uneventful. Mesta let his guard down after that, which was a big mistake. Mormon kids everywhere—me included—have always been raised on stories of pioneering martyrdom and federal oppression, but in southern Utah and northern Arizona the wariness can be tectonic. By some accounts, this wariness has been a local trait since the late 1800s. That’s when the residents of Kanab helped a fugitive Mormon named John D. Lee avoid federal posses, even though the leaders of the Mormon Church had identified Lee as the leader of a group of Mormons that had stopped a passing wagon train and killed almost everyone in it in September 1857. Lee denied the charge and claimed that he’d been made a scapegoat for what’s now known as “The Mountain Meadows Massacre.” By some accounts, that Mormon sense of “us against the world” has been periodically reinforced ever since, most notably in the eighties, when the federal government began restricting grazing on badly damaged federal lands. Not long afterward, David Brower sank a plan to transform the region forever by building four new dams on the Colorado River.

  The uranium mine in the town of Kanab went out of business in the seventies, to be followed shortly after that by the local timber mill. Global competition was the problem, but you wouldn’t hear that from the newly unemployed. They blamed meddlesome federal bureaucrats who never kept their word.

  They also blamed the Endangered Species Act. Elected officials fumed when logging was restricted near trees deemed essential to the long-term survival of the Mexican spotted owl, and when reintroduced gray wolves ran off with the occasional calf. Environmental groups that local folks had never heard of before wanted more restrictions, and at one point there was talk that the forests would be closed to protect the northern goshawk. Every time the residents of northern Arizona turned around, there seemed to be another rare critter on the land, making it harder to dig the mines and pay those grazing fees.

  This was the mood in Fredonia when the condor plan was officially unveiled in 1995. Joy Jordan, mayor of Fredonia, remembers sitting down to read the version of the plan that was published in the Federal Register. Jordan says she was shocked by the paragraph describing the range of this protected bird. “We were all inside the habitat lines,” she said. “That was a fearful thing. No matter where we went or what we did, the condor would outrank us.”2

  That wasn’t true, but it seemed like it. It was also scary. To Jordan and her allies in Fredonia and Kanab, the condor wasn’t so much a bird as it was a giant floating regulatory mechanism. Federal bureaucrats could use it to justify pretty much anything they wanted, she thought. That was not acceptable to Jordan, or to her friends and neighbors.

  The result was a hearing that very nearly killed the reintroduction project. It started when Mesta, the federal biologist, stepped up onto the small wooden stage at the Kanab High School auditorium and sat down in a chair that faced the audience. Sitting next to Mesta were Mike Wallace of the Los Angeles Zoo and Bill Heinrich of the Peregrine Fund, the nonprofit group that had been hired to manage the condor restoration program. At the center of the stage was a federal “facilitator” brought in to keep the hearing moving. He didn’t know a thing about the condor or the plan.

  The meeting was ugly from the start. Ranchers, miners, loggers, and others in the audience lined up behind the microphone, taking turns denouncing the condor plan in the strongest possible terms. They’d heard all about the economic damage condors were capable of doing, and they didn’t think the birds were worth the trouble. They knew you could go to jail for shooting a condor, even if it was an accident, even if one should happen to swoop out of nowhere and hit the grill of a pickup truck. They did not want nosy federal officials chasing condors back and forth across the grazing lands, nor did they look forward to the patronizing lectures they would get from power-mad field biologists half their age.

  Mesta badly wanted to respond to some of this, but that was against the ridiculous rules that govern these kinds of hearings. The only official allowed to talk was the hired moderator, and he didn’t know enough about the birds to help.

  Mesta could see that no one in the audience understood these rules—after airing grievances, they waited for him to start talking. When he didn’t, they got even madder and asked more questions to which he could not respond. In the end, a few public hints were dropped to say that if the condors were released they would end up full of bullets.

  Some of the speakers had been waiting for decades for the chance to tell the government off. Mesta listened while the locals complained about the problems they were having coping with other endangered species, the grudges they held against other federal officials, and a lot of unrelated things. One local man complained about the damage done by nuclear-weapons tests in the Utah desert in the fifties.

  “They were holding us accountable for everything bad that had ever happened to them,” Mesta said. “They felt like their complaints had been ignored for years, and I think they had a point.” Mesta said three people spoke in favor of the condor plan. One was a high-school science teacher, who said he felt like he’d just walked into the Roman Coliseum.

  Shortly after the meeting in Kanab, the Fish and Wildlife Service put the reintroduction plan on indefinite hold. For the next several months, Mesta and his colleagues sat down with everyone who felt like sitting down, talking, and then listening. After the formal public meetings ended, they followed the lines of pickup trucks to local restaurants, and went inside to listen more. Over and over, local folks told them it wasn’t a pers
onal thing, or even a condor thing. They just didn’t want the feds around.

  Mesta could feel them turning. What he couldn’t feel was whether they were turning fast enough. U.S. senators and representatives from Utah and Arizona were putting pressure on Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, requesting further studies, additional limitations, stronger reassurances. It didn’t help that Arizona was then governed by a Republican hard-liner named Fife Symington, who once implied that the best way to comfort an endangered species was to shoot it.

  Secretary Babbitt’s advisers were eager to throw some water on this fire, lest it spread to other programs. They were also forced to deal with some tricky legal questions. For instance, if a bird leaves its home for a millennia, does the place it left still qualify as home? If the answer was yes, was there any place the government couldn’t put endangered species?

  A self-described “good bureaucrat” named Bruce Palmer helped the government jump that trip wire. Even though he ran the Southwest office of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Palmer wasn’t brought into the condor debate until after the meeting in Kanab. “Basically I got a call that said ‘Get out there and put out the fire,’” he said.

  With the help of Robert Mesta, he moved in and quietly won the arguments against reintroduction. When a spokesman for the pilots who flew tourists over the canyon complained about possible collisions, Palmer told him it was a good point and “now all you have to do is prove that you’ve hit birds over the canyon before.” The pilots of course knew that if they documented that such collisions had happened, they might have some canceled flights; shortly afterward, they dropped their challenge to the reintroduction plan.

  Another objection fell to a more cunning bureaucratic maneuver. Rather than get involved in a fight over whether the birds had been away long enough to lose their residency status, Palmer simply noted that according to the laws of the state of Arizona, plants and animals included on the state list of endangered species were automatically eligible for federal protection, and the California condor was definitely on the state’s list. Palmer knew that this was true because he’d personally added condors to the list a few years earlier, before the plan to put the birds in the Grand Canyon had gone public. No one had objected at the time and now it was the law.

  And so it came to pass that in the fall of 1996, a twin-engine plane that was normally used to fight forest fires took off from the Burbank, California, airport. Inside the plane sat six condors inside six kennels tightly strapped into the cargo bay—one of the pilots later said it looked like the birds were preparing to parachute out of the plane above the canyon.

  When the plane landed in Arizona in the vicinity of the Vermilion Cliffs, Mesta and some other state officials moved the kennels to a helicopter, which then flew to the top of the cliffs. From there the men moved the kennels to the back of a truck, which took the birds up a gully of a road that led to the top of the cliffs where there was a large release pen.

  At the bottom of the cliffs, the Bureau of Land Management had regraded the road and built a podium. To accommodate the gathering crowd, officials had stretched a line of Porta Potties behind the podium.

  Seven hundred people came to see the birds fly. Forunately, the release went off without a hitch. Interior Secretary Babbitt hailed the grandeur of it all. Republican Senator John McCain said a few words of his own. Arizona’s Governor Symington, soon to be impeached on unrelated charges and then forced to resign, said he thought there might be a place for the condor in Arizona after all. Joy Jordan gave Bruce Palmer a hug and told him the birds were beautiful. After a few hours everyone went home and the podium was dismantled.

  Winter 1999: Eleven hundred feet above the spot where the condors were released, Shawn Farry parked a Peregrine Fund pickup truck in a clearing near the edge of the Vermilion Cliffs. When it’s not snowing up there, the rocky red landscape looks unforgiving and otherworldly, like the surface of Mars, only with trees. But on this particular day it was snowing hard, and that made the landscape look lethal. One false step on the slippery rocks and you could easily be lying on your back 1,100 feet below.

  But Farry had the pathway wired. He not only walked it on a regular basis while tracking the tagged condors, he often walked in the dark with a hundred-pound calf carcass on his back from the truck to the edge of the cliffs, where he bolted the carcass to the slab called Prometheus’ Rock. Several condors slept on ledges just below that rock, tucking their heads in under their wings for warmth and protection. In the morning, the leathery heads would sprout back out of the black-feathered bodies, and then the birds would spread their wings and rise above the edge of the cliff like so many flying saucers. Farry would be watching from his spot inside the torture chamber that was the blind.

  “The blind isn’t insulated, and when the little window in the front is open, the wind and snow blast right through and smash you in the face,” he recalled. “I’m sitting in my sleeping bag, wearing four or five layers of clothing. I’ve got a small propane heater—it doesn’t do any good unless I take my feet out of the sleeping bag. The birds are a hundred meters ahead of me, out on the edge of the cliff, but the snow is heavy and I’m having trouble seeing them. Their legs look way too gray to me, and I’m worried they might have frostbite, but I could be wrong. I put my head on the bottom of the blind so I can look through some cracks in the wood and see the feet a little better. Maybe the legs are only white from condor shit.”

  From 1997 until the start of 2002, Farry was the lead biologist for the Arizona reintroduction program. He’d never worked with condors before, but he’d read a lot about them when he was a kid growing up in upstate New York. He said he was depressed for weeks when Pete Bloom caught the last of the free-flying condors in California in 1987. He said he was intimidated the first time he saw a condor, at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

  “It was like you didn’t want to look them directly in the eye,” said Farry. “Like you were supposed to look at the ground instead. The next thing I know I’m sitting in this blind on this cliff in a snowstorm, with the fate of the Arizona program in my hands.”

  Local ranchers thought he was crazy. But gradually he’d won them over. They had watched him drag the carcasses of stillborn calves for miles over the rocks, just in case the condors needed something fresh to eat. The ranchers had invited him into their homes, eating Sunday meals. They knew he was going to keep these birds alive or die trying, and that had earned him some respect.

  But Farry and the condors still had enemies. He and his colleagues still changed the subject when strangers asked them what they did for a living. They still had to stand there and take it every now and then when a gas station attendant or a bartender launched into a tirade against endangered species.

  They also got some nasty hate mail. Farry read some of it while he was sitting in the blind, waiting for the storms to clear. “Meet your worst nightmare,” one missive said.

  You guys are a bunch of criminals! You are worse than the vultures you feel give meaning to your pathetic lives! I will not rest until every damned condor is removed from the Grand Canyon! I will not sleep until every newspaper in the country knows the truth!!! [I am] fed up with you, you environmental wackos!

  That was the worst of a long series of e-mails written by a man who had helped an injured friend hike out of a campsite at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. While he and the friend were making their way up and out of the canyon, a group of condors had found the site and ripped it to pieces. Farry’s crew found the wreckage, cleaned up the campsite, and started packing the detritus out of the canyon. On the trail, they met the man who had just helped his injured friend hike out. Farry said the guy went ballistic.

  “He wanted to be covered for the damage,” Farry said. “But the Fish and Wildlife Service couldn’t do that. Campers in the canyon are supposed to know that they can’t leave their gear out in the open, and if they have to do it, they are taking their chances. If we paid this guy, we’d end up paying all kinds of peop
le, and that wasn’t going to work. Do you pay a guy who gets bit by an ant and goes into shock? Do you pay a guy when a passing bird craps on his car? It would never end.”

  New groups of condors were released on a regular basis, and soon there were dozens of condors soaring over the area. With the help of five colleagues, Farry worked insanely hard to keep the birds alive. Each bird had a pair of transmitters on its wings, and Farry and his coworkers were expected to follow the birds’ movements twenty-four hours a day. When a condor ate something that hadn’t been laid out for it, Farry was supposed to backtrack and find out what the carcass was. When a condor buzzed a crowd on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Farry was supposed to catch the bird, or chase it away. He wore out a series of pickup trucks chasing the six birds around. When a bird was injured, he tracked it down, and put it in a kennel, and drove the kennel to the office of a friendly veterinarian in Page, Arizona.3

  “You want surreal? Here’s surreal,” Farry said. “I’m sitting in the waiting room of the animal hospital in Page, reading a magazine and waiting for a space in front of the X-ray machine, and the kennel starts hissing and bouncing toward the door. A giant beak would poke out through the bars. People would start freaking out. Usually I just kept reading.”

  Farry said it wasn’t long before he figured out that it was physically impossible to manage these birds and study them at the same time. It took hours to drive from the Vermilion Cliffs to the South Rim. Also, if a condor got especially sick, you had to drive it all the way to Phoenix, which sometimes meant driving for seven hours straight with a condor vomiting out of the sides of the kennel next to you.