Condor Read online

  Snyder says the problem is lead shot in the carcasses of animals left behind by hunters. When condors eat the carcasses they swallow lead pellets and lead-bullet fragments, and lead is just about the worst thing you can put into a condor. It’s a toxin and an element, which means it never stops being poisonous. Lead also binds to common proteins in the bloodstreams of animals, so that it can’t be flushed out by the liver. Lead ruins the brain and the central nervous system, but it usually kills condors by closing down the nerves that work the digestive system.2

  Condors that eat a lot of lead die slow, horrible deaths. Near the end, they can barely crawl. Low doses of lead may degrade a condor’s flying skills, raising the odds that the bird will be killed by an eagle or a coyote. Other condors crowd in and push such a bird off carcasses, just because they can. Reproductive problems are another side effect.

  Shawn Farry told me all about the single biggest lead scare in the history of the program. It started on June 6, 1999, when a condor in the Grand Canyon ate what may have been its final meal. With the help of twelve friends, condor number 165 peeled the meat off a carcass in some bushes near the edge of the national park.

  A few days later, 165 disappeared. Farry stopped getting signals from the beepers on the bird’s wings, which either meant the condor was on a long trip or that it was now dead. Dying condors sometimes crawl into caves that block the signals from radio-tracking devices on their wings, and when they end up at the bottoms of canyons it is very hard to get a reading. Farry and the rest of the field crew launched an all-out search that ended when he saw the bird lying on its back at the bottom of a canyon near the big resort hotels. The right wing, half open, was caught in a branch; the left was crushed against the body. The partially buried head pointed toward the top of the 45-degree talus slope. The legs were sticking straight up into the air. Farry made his way down to the bird and pulled out a notebook:

  The carcass, specifically the top of the head and the leading edges of the folding wings, are covered in fine dirt consistent with the surrounding soil. A likely impact site is located approximately twenty feet upslope of the carcass, along with a slide path to its final location. The contact of the left wing with the dead branch appears to have arrested the carcass’s slide. Small fragments of vegetation and fine debris cover the carcass along with bits of sharp vegetation “puncturing” flight feathers further indicating an impact. The location also indicates a direct “dead” fall from the rim above with no indications of a controlled glide or descent.

  Judging from this evidence, 165 had fallen off a cliff and plummeted straight down to the bottom of the canyon. Farry saw nothing that would indicate an attempt at flight. This bird was dead or very nearly dead before it hit the ground.

  Farry found no bullet wounds or signs of an attack. The left wing was broken, but that had almost certainly happened after the bird fell. Number 165 historically had been a very healthy bird, and a good flier: “Nothing in this bird’s history foreshadowed this mortality.”

  The carcass was flown to a zoo where pathologists immediately found the cause of death. Seventeen lead pellets showed up in the X-rays, all of them in the gut.

  A few days later, field biologist Gretchen Druliner noticed that condor number 91 had given up eating and crawled under a boulder near the Vermilion Cliffs. The bird was alive when she got to it, but only barely. Druliner brought it to the office at Vermilion Cliffs.

  “At this time [the condor] could barely stand or keep her eyes open and weighed only ten pounds,” Farry wrote. “She appeared to be approximately ten percent dehydrated and severely emaciated. A blood sample was taken and we administered 180 cc of subcutaneous fluids. She also drank approximately two cups of water on her own.”

  The bird got better, then crashed. Farry drove it to the Phoenix Zoo, where a blood test showed severe anemia. A blood transfusion helped, but only briefly; after perking up a bit, 91 fell over dead.

  Condor number 82 was the next to go: a biologist found it on the ground a little farther from the Vermilion Cliffs. “Face down, wings open,” Farry wrote. “The carcass was in extremely poor condition, indicating that she had been at this location for some time.” Farry’s hunch was that the bird was trying to return to the Vermilion Cliffs when its wings gave out. After the bird hit the ground and died, coyotes tore it to bits.

  Traps for the remaining condors had been set by then—big mesh boxes over the carcasses, with an open door at one end. When six or seven condors had walked through the door, a field biologist would snap it by pulling on a hidden line.

  At first the condors kept their distance, which came as no surprise. “They’d all done the same thing before and ended up in kennels.” These were remarkably wily birds, but Farry was too rushed to be impressed; for all he knew, every condor in the area had lead pellets melting in its guts.

  “I’d sit there in the blind and watch them land on top of the trap, and then walk around it, and then jump back on top, and I’m thinking, Please go inside, please, please, please. But they don’t.”

  Another bird was AWOL by this time: condor number 150 had disappeared after flying into Marble Canyon. A very weak set of beeps seemed to be coming from a section of the Colorado River called the Sheer Wall Rapids.

  “Attempts to triangulate the signal by circling around to the eastern rim [from the western rim] failed,” Farry wrote. Climbing several thousand feet up to the top of a place called Echo Cliffs didn’t help—Farry couldn’t find the signal up there, either. The Hatch Company lent a hand by allowing him to stick telemetry devices to one of their planes, but this attempt also came up empty. “The signal remained stationary, extremely weak, and defied pinpointing,” Farry wrote in his notes. Condor 150 was the first condor ever hatched at the Peregrine Fund and was never found.

  Farry and the crew lured the remaining eleven condors into the walk-in trap with a carcass inside it. The newly captured birds were locked in kennels and driven to the trailer at Vermilion Cliffs. Inside, Farry and his colleagues pulled the birds out of the kennels and held them down on a table. Blood was drawn and run through a brand-new high-speed lead-testing machine. Three minutes later, a rough lead count flashed on a screen, sometimes next to the word “high.” Birds with high counts were loaded back into their kennels and driven over to the veterinary clinic in Page. If X-rays there showed pellets, the condors were loaded up again and hauled to the Phoenix Zoo.

  The pressure was overwhelming. “I’d be standing there with five or six kennels with condors inside them lined up on the kitchen floor,” Farry recalled. “We’d take a bird out of the kennel and draw some blood and spend the next three minutes totally freaked out. Then the machine beeps and the guy next to me just says ‘high.’ When he says it for the fifth time in a row, you know it’s going to be a long night.”

  Some of the birds in the kennels were barely breathing; others were bouncing around and screeching like they’d been stabbed. One of the first lead readings seemed impossible—condor 158, a five-year-old male, had the highest lead count ever recorded in a California condor. “Three hundred ninety,” Farry said. “This bird should have been dead. A count in the mid–three hundreds was supposed to be lethal. If anybody ever needed proof that these birds were resilient, this was it.”

  Condor 158 had six lead shotgun pellets in her gizzard. Condor 133 had one in her intestine. Condor 136 had two in the gut; condor 119 had one.

  These birds were driven to Phoenix to have the pellets removed. Other birds were forced to endure an extremely painful cleansing process called chelation therapy. One or two people would hold a bird while Farry injected a chemical called calcium EDTA into its chest muscles. Each bird needed two injections a day for at least five days. The shots were extremely painful, even when the calcium EDTA was mixed with painkillers.

  Farry said he thought about how much the birds were going to hate the sight of his face for the rest of their lives. “We’d been trying to teach the birds to stay away from people, and one
of the ways you do that is to make the birds associate humans with pain. It didn’t seem like they were going to have problems making that association after this was over with.”

  The first round of chelation shots did what it was supposed to do—lead levels in all of the birds started to fall. A second round of shots pulled the levels down even further. Except for 191—the second bird to die—all nine of the captured condors were now out of danger. By putting the birds and the field crew through several weeks of hell, Farry had saved the reputation of the Peregrine Fund. If all or most of the captured birds had died, it’s likely the Arizona reintroduction program would have died with it.

  But what was he supposed to do now? Rerelease the condors back into the environment that had just poisoned them? Send them to the zoos and wait for a new set of birds? Farry and his colleagues tried to think the issue through. The first problem was that they didn’t know where the lead in the birds had come from, and there were a lot of possibilities.

  So what were the clues? According to Farry, one was that these condors liked company. They followed each other around and ate from the same carcasses, like the one he’d seen them eating from just before the crisis developed. Another clue was that the birds all got sick at once. Farry thought the clues pointed toward a “massive freak event,” which was not likely to recur. All he had to do was find a giant, half-eaten, lead-filled carcass in the vicinity and the case would have been closed.3

  But he didn’t find it, and there was another clue that didn’t seem to fit this explanation. Lead pellets pulled from the birds were of different sizes, which meant they were almost certainly fired out of several shotguns. This raised several possibilities, two of which would have been alarming. If the condors got the lead poisoning by eating carcasses in several different locations, it would mean that no gunshot carcass was safe for the birds and it would be time to send them back to the zoos. The other scary thought was that a group that didn’t like the condors had prepared a booby trap, filling one carcass with bullets. Farry thought it far more likely that some small-time rabbit hunters did it by mistake, by stacking up several dozen rabbit carcasses and posing for a picture. Or maybe it was a bunch of drunk teenagers opening up on a dead horse. In the absence of the carcass, there was cover for all kinds of theories.

  Farry decided to write the episode off as a well-meaning mistake. “Maybe someone who loved condors thought he would make sure they had enough to eat, and so he shot a bunch of animals and laid them out where he thought the birds would find them.”

  Farry released the birds in the fall. Over the years, this process had become routine. But not this time. This time Farry was worried that he might be making a terrible mistake. That’s what he says he was thinking about as he prepared the birds to be released. First he tested new radio transmitters on the wings of the birds, attaching them with “cable ties, nuts and bolts, dental floss and super glue.” Then he weighed the birds, checked their vital signs, and double-checked the transmitters.

  “Then the condor is carried toward the cliff edge and gently released on the ground,” he wrote in his notes. “Typically the condor takes a few seconds to regain its composure before it takes to the air, catching the strong uplifting winds generated by the sheer sandstone walls.” Farry and his colleagues had seen that happen so often they sometimes took it for granted, but this was not one of those times. “On October 26, 2000, releasing condors back into the wilds very different,” he wrote. “To say we were a bit apprehensive is an understatement.”

  sixteen

  ELVIS REENTERS THE BUILDING

  Mike Wallace started thinking about hang gliding in the early 1980s, when he was working with Andean condors in Peru. When he saw California condors shadowing gliders near the Sespe in the 1990s, he knew he had to get up there. “I wasn’t that old,” Wallace said. “Anyway I talked about it and talked about it until my girlfriend cut a hang glider ad out of the paper and slapped it down on the table in front of me. ‘Okay, Mike, no more excuses.’”

  We talked while driving north along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains on a ten-lane interstate freeway. I sat next to Wallace with a tape recorder and a notebook in my lap. The back of the pickup we were riding in held all of the essential field supplies—doughnuts and candy bars, a framed picture of Carl Koford, a backpack full of camping stuff, a garbage bag with dirty laundry inside it, one running shoe, and a silver briefcase containing a digital camera with a giant telephoto lens.

  We were going to a condor party on the old Hopper Ranch, now the Hopper Mountain Refuge. Wallace was to be there as a representative of the captive breeding program at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and as the chairman of a panel that’s supposed to advise the condor recovery program. I’d come out to talk to him at the wild animal park, and then at his home in a rural corner of San Diego County. The house he lived in with his wife and daughter was surrounded by an avocado orchard, and Wallace had dabbled in the sales end of that business for a while. But Wallace didn’t need such cutthroat competition, and it wasn’t long before he gave up trying to make a profit.

  “Here’s the thing about hang gliding,” he said while pulling out to pass a gargantuan truck. “Every time I do it I am overwhelmed by the condors’ flying skills. They can see a black patch of ground a mile away and instantly know the exact size and shape of the thermal wind rising out of it. As a nonflapping entity, I am always trying to calculate these things, and it always amazes me to think that the birds do it naturally.”

  “Nonflapping entity?” I asked.

  “Airplane, helicopter, rocket ship, blimp—pretty much everything that flies that’s not a bird or a bat.”

  The Foothill Freeway merged with the westbound Simi Valley Freeway, which rose and banked to the west. Elevated interstates are no longer built in California—they fall down in earthquakes—and in a way that’s sad. I like the way they force people to look out on the worlds they are missing as they drive back and forth from work.

  “Look at that line of thermal heads,” Wallace said, pointing at a line of clouds that made me think of bouffant hairdos. “Underneath each of those clouds is a powerful column of rising air. When they line up like that, it’s called a cloud street. Soaring birds and really good hang glider pilots use clouds like those as stepping-stones.”

  “What if you’re a bad hang glider pilot?”

  “Then you get sucked up into the cloud or stranded out in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. You land in a parking lot if you’re lucky. If you’re not, you crash into a building.”

  The sign for the Golden State Freeway exit said 2.5 miles. Has Wallace ever flown with the condors? “No,” he said, wistfully. “I can’t do that. I’m the guy who ends up on the ground with the radio, telling other pilots not to get too close. That doesn’t help if the condors want to get close, which happens frequently. But no, I don’t think I’m ever going to live the dream of looking over and seeing a condor arcing across the sky right next to me. I’ve done that with seagulls, red-tailed hawks, golden eagles. But not condors.”

  We leaned into the off-ramp to the Golden State (better known as the I-5) north and swirled through a corkscrew 275-degree turn. After flying forward for a couple of minutes, we swirled in the opposite direction, landing on the westbound side of State Highway 126. The road my family knew as Blood Alley was now a four-lane thruway to the ocean, and not the hair-raising thrill ride down the north side of the Santa Clara River. South of the river were the familiar lines of orange trees, but not for very much longer: the foreign conglomerate that had just bought the Newhall Land and Farming Company was planning to drop several hundred houses on top of them. Environmental groups were trying to persuade the conglomerate to rethink its plans, but it had refused to give an inch, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was ready to approve the project. It would be the largest single suburban development ever approved by the county.

  We passed the turnoff to the town once known as Mr. Cook’s Garden of Ed
en: Piru City, Ventura County, population 356. As we passed, I looked to the hills behind the town, where Mr. Cook’s mansion had once stood. It had been reduced to ashes in 1982 when a painter dropped a torch on the roof. Ventura County fire-men raced to the scene, but they couldn’t find a fire hydrant. The trucks ran out of water as the mansion went up in flames. In the chaos, the firemen failed to notice the pool next to the house. While the mansion was burning, a television reporter asked Scott Newhall, “How does it feel?” “Wonderful,” Scott replied. “Really *&^&%$#@ great! How the hell do you think it feels to watch your house burn down!” The footage never aired.

  Scott and Ruth Newhall, family friends and two of my personal heroes, were the owners of the mansion when it burned. They’d bought it in the 1970s when Scott moved out of the executive editor’s office at the San Francisco Chronicle. When I was in college in Northern California, I used to visit them all the time. Scott told stories from the “wacko years” he spent at the helm of the Chronicle. Ruth repeatedly demolished me at Scrabble.

  Scott died unexpectedly in 1987. But before he died, he and Ruth built a copy of Mr. Cook’s mansion on the charred foundation of the first one. Except for the sprinklers in the new ceilings and the statue of a phoenix on one of the towers, the new house looks exactly like the old one. More precisely, it looks the way the old one must have looked when Mr. Cook built it at the end of the nineteenth century. I can see him standing on the turret at the top of a brand-new red stone tower, gazing out at the future metropolis of Piru City, California.