Condor Read online

  Burnett had been hired by the Ventana Wilderness Society, a nonprofit conservation group that had just finished reintroducing golden eagles to these same mountains. He was then a twenty-something kid from Virginia who had come to California to work with bald eagles and ended up more or less living his dream. Keeping company with condors wasn’t quite what he had expected, but that only made it more exciting.

  “I’m sitting there waiting for the birds to soar up into the clouds while everybody oohs and ahhs,” said Burnett. “‘Oh, the mysterious condor,’ that kind of thing. What they do instead is fly straight over to the blind with the photographers in it and land right on top of the thing. Then they lean over and stick their heads in the openings we made for the cameras. It was like, ‘Hello! You’re busted in there!’ I was thinking ‘Oh shit, this isn’t right.’”

  Burnett said he’d been worrying about these birds since the day they arrived. One of the birds seemed sluggish to him, and there was something vaguely odd about the other three. He couldn’t say why, but these condors looked a little slow to him, as if they were waiting to be told exactly what to do.2

  None of these young condors had ever spent time with an adult member of their species. They had all been raised by condor puppets attached to the hands of captive breeders; after that, they’d only seen each other. Burnett called Wallace, who gave him his standard line: relax and wait.

  Burnett said he spent the next several months trying to keep a bunch of “shoelace nibbling” condors out of trouble. He kept them from ending up splattered all over the windshields of the trucks and sports cars flying up and down the Pacific Coast Highway and pulled them out of nasty stretches of dried-out chaparral. At one point, he found them sitting in some trees near a bunch of naked sunbathers at the famous New Age spa called the Esalen Institute: “All I could think was, ‘Man I hope they know these people aren’t dead yet,’” he said. Burnett said that the owners of the institute were very understanding, even though he was dressed like a commando and armed with a “net gun” that looked like a bazooka. “They asked me to stay in the bushes,” he said. “That was fun up until the end, when I saw the birds up on the roof of one of the buildings. I climbed up onto the roof and snuck up on them and fired the net and ran over to the edge of the roof to get them and there were about forty people standing right below us. Most of them had clothes on.”

  Eventually he threw a fit, calling Wallace to tell him he was sick of cleaning up after puppet-reared birds. Wallace said he’d take another look at how the birds were being raised in the captive breeding programs. The puppet-trained birds were captured and replaced by a group of slightly older condors that had been raised by adult birds. They were the only group of condors in the wild raised exclusively by real birds.

  This group stayed out of trouble. When it got around that this was happening, Burnett got a call from the man who had published more peer-reviewed studies of the condor than everyone else combined. Burnett had never talked to Noel Snyder before, but he’d heard all about his exploits in the Sespe Sanctuary in the 1980s. Snyder explained that he’d rekindled his interest in the California Condor Program, partly because of complaints from friends still in the field. At the moment, he was working on a broad review of the recovery program, and he wanted to come and see the Ventana birds.

  “I told him, sure, no problem,” said Burnett. “He was here for several days. I was pretty sure we had a problem with the puppet birds at that point, but when Noel’s paper came out, it seemed like he was trying to close down the program. I thought he really overdid it.”

  The broad review was published in the August 2000 issue of Conservation Biology, a scientific journal. Next to Sndyer’s name were the names of several coauthors, including Dave Clendenen, who’d just quit his job in the Sespe Sanctuary, and Vicky Meretsky, a computer-modeling specialist at Indiana University, who’d worked with free-flying condors in the 1980s. After plugging everything she knew about the birds into a new computer model, Meretsky had concluded that the most expensive endangered-species-protection program in American history was about to crash and burn. Misbehaving condors were dying in the wild with alarming frequency, she found. “Good” birds were being led astray. The birds had not improved with age, as hoped for, and there wasn’t any evidence that change was on the way. Extinction wasn’t likely, but if present trends continued, success was out of the question.

  “The program had become a stocking operation,” Snyder said. “Birds were dying in the wild at the same rate that they were coming out of the captive breeding programs. Success was still a possibility, but not without major changes.”

  Snyder and his coauthors charged that many of these problems could be traced back to the puppet-raised birds. According to the paper, the birds weren’t fooled by the imitation parent birds—they knew there were human hands inside those beaks, and human heads behind the mirrored windows. These were the birds that headed straight for people when they were released to the wild, the paper surmised. Puppet-reared birds that got in trouble had been led astray, the authors said. For proof, consider the Big Sur program, where birds reared only by live parent-birds were acting like condors were supposed to act.

  In interviews, Snyder and his colleagues said the condor program was becoming “a perpetual and very expensive black hole.” Reversing the trend meant rebooting the entire program. All of the condors in the wild needed to be captured and returned to the zoos. After that, more birds could be released. Since there was no hope for the puppet-reared birds, they’d have to stay in the zoos for the rest of their lives.

  Snyder’s findings came as no surprise. He aired his concerns at what I’ve heard described as an “excruciatingly tense” meeting of the condor recovery team, and in the book he had just published. But the harshness of the paper knocked the program for a loop, which was quickly followed by an uproar. People with the program questioned the strength of Meretsky’s modeling work and the accuracy of some of her key data. Snyder and Wallace, once close friends, are now said to be the bitterest of enemies.3

  When I met with Wallace in San Diego in March 2002, he tried to give Snyder his due. “I think the recovery program is in better shape because of the paper and the book,” he said. “I don’t agree with the conclusions, but we needed a kick in the pants. We made a lot of changes at the captive breeding center after Noel started in on us. We would have made the changes anyway, but not so fast.”

  The changes Wallace made aren’t anywhere near as drastic as the ones Snyder wanted, but Wallace said they’ve helped. Young birds are released with older ones, and puppet-reared birds are never released without at least one parent-reared bird. Keepers who work the puppets try much harder to avoid being seen, and the puppets have a new personality.

  “When we started doing this, the puppet birds were always very gentle with their young, but that’s not what the real parents do. If a chick does something wrong, the parent lets it know. It’s like Pow, a whack in the head. Gotta teach those little guys some discipline, you know?”

  Back in the Ventana Wilderness, Joe Burnett has also seen some changes. He still chases condors out of residential neighborhoods, but these days that’s relatively rare. He said that as the birds have aged, they’ve learned to do some of the things condors did in the old days. When I asked him what he meant, he drove me down to the edge of the cliffs.

  “See that beach down there?” he said. “About a year ago we stopped getting signals on the radio tags on a couple of puppet-reared condors. We drove around for a long time trying to pick up a signal, and then we got this tiny little blip while we were driving past these cliffs. I make it out to where we’re standing now and there they are at the bottom of the cliff, hammering away at the carcass of a sea lion. I saw the giant wings and a lot of blood and it was amazing. I mean this was something condors weren’t supposed to be able to do anymore.”

  It was at just about this time that Les Reid’s condors stopped coming around. Reid said he was glad they’d fi
nally figured out which end was supposed to be up. But I think he missed them dearly.

  fifteen

  THE REAL KILLERS

  Heavy winds rumble through the empty grazing lands near the tiny town of Gorman, north of where the eight-lane freeway known as Interstate 5 crashes through the once-forbidding Tejon Pass. When the winds are at their worst, they rattle the cars rolling down the part of the interstate known as the Grapevine, forcing cautious drivers to pull over to the side and wait for the weather to die down. Incautious drivers are sometimes punished by gusts that flick their cars off the side of I-5, or into the fleets of tractor-trailers roaring past the rocks that used to hide the bandits and the Indians.

  Atmospheric restlessness is common in the mountains at the base of the San Joaquin Valley. In certain places the winds never seem to stop. Condors know exactly where these places are and how they’re linked together—they know how to ride them from Ventura County east to the crucial feeding grounds, and then on to the southern end of the Sierra Nevada. If it takes a long time to find a meal, the birds don’t have to worry—since they’ve got an easy ride home, they’re free to spend some extra time patrolling.

  The winds near the town of Gorman are a crucial link in this chain. On maps of the condors’ range they sit at the center of the wishbone, with the coastal mountains on one side, the Sierra Nevada on the other, and the Transverse Ranges at the base. Condors won’t be cut off if the chain is broken, but they will have to use more energy to move across the base of the wishbone.

  That’s why alarms went off in the offices of the National Audubon Society when a well-connected energy company tried to build a wind farm near Gorman in 1999. Fifty-three towers with two-hundred-foot propellers were to be raised and strung across the birds’ flight path, raising fears that condors would be shredded if they failed to see the fans. Activists imagined finding hacked-off wings and giant feathers at the base of the towers. This had never happened to a condor passing over an existing wind farm, but it had happened to golden eagles, and that seemed close enough.

  Condors have been killed many different ways over the years—they’ve been poisoned, shot, starved, stoned, clawed, drowned, beaten, pierced, smothered, eaten, skinned, and even buried alive. In the 1920s, three condors died when they tried to fly through a hailstorm. But of all the sordid ends these birds have managed to meet, none compared with being pureed. That was the opinion of Dan Beard, the Audubon staffer whose job it was to keep the towers from being built.

  The energy company that wanted to build them was called Enron. Through the Clinton years, it had worked hard to cultivate a “good guy” image with environmentalists, mostly by proclaiming an intention to invest in alternative energy sources. That image would eventually be vaporized a few years later when Enron turned out to be a corrupt corporate hellhole. But in 1999, the company was the environmental golden child, and golden children don’t kill condors. They build solar energy arrays and energy-saving freezers, and nonpolluting wind farms that resemble modern art. Big metal towers, all in rows, all with spinning propellers. As if Christo himself had installed it. Spokesmen for the company were said to be insulted by the thought that they would try to build anything like a “condor death trap.”1

  But the National Audubon Society said that that was exactly what was happening, at a press conference held just after the Enron Wind Corporation unveiled its plans. “It’s hard to imagine a worse idea than putting a condor Cuisinart next door to a critical condor habitat,” said Beard. “We believe this project should be stopped.” Beard made it clear that he didn’t want a smaller wind farm built, or a perhaps a wind farm where the towers were “improved” in ways that might have made them easier to miss. He wanted to kill any idea of wind farms near Gorman.

  Audubon had derailed a plan to build a larger set of towers in this same location back in 1989, but that was not a project backed by Enron. Wind power was then the world’s fastest growing source of energy, and many environmentalists were praying for continued growth. These activists stressed that wind farms were clean sources of electricity, producing no radioactive waste and virtually no pollution. Bill Clinton’s Energy Department was subsidizing wind farms by handing out 5 percent tax breaks, and California seemed to be the market of the future.

  Beard’s response to all of this was adamant and politically awkward. He said Audubon supported the idea of wind power, but not when it posed a threat to birds and especially not when it threatened to mince a lot of condors. The problem with this caveat was that birds and wind farms often need the same kinds of winds: that’s why lines of turbines tend to end up on the ridgelines of mountains in the middle of migratory pathways. And for a while the talk-show hosts and columnists circled like sharks. Depending on whom you listened to, this wind farm was a reason to drill for oil and build nuclear plants—proof that environmentalists were people to be ignored—or a great reason to invest in solar power and hydrogen.

  Meanwhile, Enron was threatening to bury Audubon. Publicly, the company kept saying it was sure the towers wouldn’t hurt the condors, but in private meetings, Enron took a much harder line. It was going to use its power and influence to make the activists look like fools and then it was going to go ahead with the wind project. Enron was then thought to have enough money to stick around until its enemies had to give up, and the public-relations skills to make it look as if it had taken the high ground. If Beard and his colleagues didn’t step aside, they would look like friends of the big polluters they’d spent so many years fighting, and the condor would be painted as an anti-environmental bird.

  Beard and his colleagues ended this game by taking a page out of David Brower’s playbook, and with a semisecret deal that Brower never would have made. Full-page ads denouncing Enron ran in several newspapers, and large amounts of billboard space were purchased in Los Angeles and in Enron’s home city of Houston. The billboards showed a giant vulture headed toward the turbines, over the words ENRON WIND CORP. and the words KILL THE CONDORS?

  The semisecret deal aligned Audubon with the owners of the Tejon Ranch, who were then laying plans to develop large parts of the California condor’s range. The owners of the ranch thought the wind-farm plan might get in the way of their development plans, partly because the “visible blight” of the towers would be close to the freeway. After paying for the billboards and the newspaper ads, the ranch owners went to Enron and offered them a deal: give us that land and we’ll give you some land that is out of the condors’ flight path.

  When Enron took the offer, Beard called the press and praised it as visionary. “Enron Wind has a long history of dealing with environmental concerns in a positive, responsible manner,” Beard said. “Enron Wind has clearly proven that it is a company committed to protecting the environment.” Audubon also threw its unconditional support behind a push to reauthorize the Wind Energy Protection Tax Credit Act, which had helped make it possible for Enron to purchase the land near Gorman in the first place.

  That was when the owners of the Tejon Ranch unveiled a plan to build a big residential development on the former site of the wind farm. “We got screwed,” said a former member of the California Condor Recovery team. “It was as simple as that.” Actually, it wasn’t as simple as that, since the ranch had made no promises, but relations between the ranch and the condors’ keepers had been raw for years by then, and it was easy for each group to assume the worst of the other.

  The owners of the Tejon Ranch had been trying to get their land out from under the condor since the early 1970s, when a huge part of the ranch was identified as critically important to the future of the species. Technically, the “Critical Habitat” rule in the Endangered Species Act doesn’t have a lot of legal force, but the fear that it might, if tested in a court of law, is the kind of thing that makes banks withhold loans. Lawyers representing the ranch tried repeatedly to work paragraphs into recovery plans that would have freed them of any obligation to accommodate the condor. This strategy appeared to peak in
1998, when the company argued that the condor had been “technically extinct,” as the last wild bird had been captured in 1987. That argument was never made in court, but the chance that it could be lingered for years, until the warring parties cut a deal.

  In March 2002, the captive breeding programs reached a milestone. After falling to a probable low of fewer than twenty-five birds in the 1970s, the species had now rebounded to two hundred condors alive. Educated guessers said it had been at least a century since there had been so many condors.

  One of the condors that had stopped laying eggs, AC-8, also known as the Matriarch because of her age (thirty-nine) and because she’d laid so many eggs at the captive breeding center at the Los Angeles Zoo, was to be released in the Sespe Wilderness to act as a “mentor bird” to zoo-bred condors struggling in the wild. Joe Burnett had cooked up the plan with the help of Mike Clark, a condor keeper at the Los Angeles Zoo who’d worked with AC-8 for years.

  But Noel Snyder didn’t like the plan at all. He’d known the Matriarch as she’d grown up in the wild and paired off with Igor. Snyder and his colleagues on the zombie patrol had taken her eggs and flown them down to the captive breeding center. But it wasn’t his personal attachment to AC-8 that drove Snyder’s opposition to the so-called mentor plan; he just didn’t think any of the birds were safe in the wild. “It stuns me to think that we’re releasing birds into such a poisonous habitat,” he said. “That was one of the reasons we removed them all in the 1980s. The galling thing is that we now know what the poison is and where it’s coming from, but nobody has been able to do anything about it.”