Condor Page 23

  “Is that place a metaphor or what?” I really did say that as the new mansion came into view. Wallace didn’t know what I was talking about and I didn’t really want to tell him, so we drove on without saying a word. At Fillmore we swung north toward the birds, following the still-wild Sespe Creek to a sharply angled oil road etched into the side of a cracked, dry mountain. As we rose, we sank into the folds of this mountain, losing sight of everything behind us. Hammer-shaped oil pumps covered with rust bobbed endlessly up and down. For a time the groaning of the pumps seemed to be the only sign of life. But as we neared the top of the oil road, the view changed radically as the sky took on a life of its own, looking bluer and deeper and bigger than I’d ever seen it look before. I could almost see the heavy winds that were pushing the clouds and the birds around. When Wallace stopped the pickup truck to open a gate, I heard the wind passing over us, rattling the leaves on the branches of the trees.

  We passed the ruined shack that had been Carl Koford’s home in the years before World War II. Just before dark, we reached the battered ranch house that served as a base for the condor field team. I sneaked Koford’s portrait photo onto a shelf in the living room, over a fireplace that had just been condemned. Four more condors were to be released near here in the morning. Three were zoo-breds. The other was the wild condor Pete Bloom trapped in April 1987. Good old Igor.

  The plan to put Igor back where he had come from was approved in December 2002, at a meeting of the condor recovery team in the education building at the Los Angeles Zoo.1 The first thing I saw when I entered the room was the big, stuffed gorilla in the glass case. Then I saw the big, stuffed tigers and the big, stuffed grizzly bear. They looked a little glassy-eyed, but that’s to be expected when your eyes are made out of glass. I wondered what their stories were and when those stories had ended.

  Several dozen people were sitting in rows of uncomfortable folding metal chairs, and more people were on the way in. According to the fat blue binders we were handed at the door, talk of Igor’s future would come late that afternoon, after a review of the various substrates used to line the bottoms of portable kennels and before the discussions of “telemetry dilemmas,” “Listserv etiquette,” and something called “the Nixolite Experience.” Bruce Palmer, then the director of the condor recovery team, opened the meeting by announcing that the budget for the coming fiscal year would be $1.7 million. Palmer added that most of the money would be spent to repair aging captive breeding centers at the zoos. “One point seven million dollars is a lot of bucks, but unfortunately it’s not enough,” he said.

  A groan ran through the back of the crowd at that point. The field crews were not happy. They were the ones who were hurt the most by the perennial shortage of funding: eighty-hour workweeks on temporary contracts with pathetic benefits were more or less par for the course. Palmer didn’t like it, either, but there wasn’t much he could do: critics of the Endangered Species Act had been hacking away at the budgets for projects like this one for many years. The need to find out what was killing condors in the wild was desperate at this point, but the puny budget made that hard to do.

  “I came into this program thinking I knew what was going on,” said Palmer when I talked to him later. “Turns out I didn’t have a clue. Every time you think you understand this bird it does something nobody expected. As for the politics, you don’t want to know. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  Talk of lead and misbehaving birds was much more civil than I thought it would be, partly because Noel Snyder and his allies had been encouraged not to attend. They’d tried to make the case for a ban on lead bullets at the last meeting of the recovery team, but that encounter had produced more heat than light. The state of California had commissioned a study of the lead-poisoning problem, but it wasn’t likely to be ready for months. After the meeting, Snyder’s strongest ally on the recovery team resigned from the Fish and Wildlife Service to manage a private refuge. Robert Risebrough, a toxicologist revered by some for the work he’d done to help convince the Environmental Protection Agency to ban DDT, said he didn’t think lead bullets were the source of the condor’s lead problems. Based on what he called a preliminary study of lead readings from the condor’s rangelands in California, Risebrough said the real problem could be polluted rain. Risebrough wondered whether rainwater with lead traces from many sources was collecting on the leaves of plants that were eaten by deer. When those deer were shot, or killed in more “natural” ways, the condors that came down to clean the carcasses would have picked up the accumulated doses. Risebrough thought this theory explained why blood-lead levels in the condors seemed to fall at the height of the hunting season, since that was also when the fall rains would have washed the lead off the leaves.

  Risebrough said his theory didn’t work for condors living near the Grand Canyon, where fragments of lead were often found in the gullets of dying condors. But he wasn’t sure the poisoned birds that had turned up so far in Arizona were victims of a widespread hunting problem. Risebrough thought most of these dead birds had been done in by “a single mass-poisoning event,” implying that it almost certainly would not happen a second time. Later he would change his mind about this, but at the meeting I attended, he came across as a hard-line skeptic of Snyder’s belief that hunters with lead bullets were the culprits.

  Discussions of the misbehaving birds were even briefer, perhaps because no condors had been seen on Les Reid’s deck for close to a year. Incremental signs of behavioral progress were reported by all of the field crews, and the consensus seemed to be that the birds were getting wiser as they aged. Condors brought up by puppets did not seem to be raising more hell than the other ones were, which wasn’t entirely good, since the puppet birds and the parent birds were continuing to perform in front of cheering crowds of tourists at the El Tovar Hotel in the Grand Canyon.

  The Igor discussion went by in a hurry, even though many people in the room seemed to have a lot to say about him. Behaviorists were worried that Igor might butt in on well-established pairs. Others said that didn’t matter, as Igor was a well-known stud. Someone wondered why the zoos would want to give away a well-known stud; the answer was that Igor’s genes were so well represented that his services were no longer needed.

  In the wild, Igor would probably settle down with AC-8, the Matriarch, his old breeding partner: she had been the first condor taken from the wild to be released, a year before. AC-8 had also been a breeding machine, but she’d recently had a tumor removed, and veterinarians wondered if she’d become sterile as a result.

  “Releasing AC-9 would make a pretty good movie of the week,” said Shawn Farry. “But is this more than a stunt? Maybe it’s a good idea to put an older bird back into the wild with the young ones, but why does it have to be this one?”

  The unspoken answer to Farry’s question seemed to be “Why not?” as news that Igor was to be released could bring reporters by the dozens. But the trapdoor in the bottom of that argument was opened by botanist Maeton Freel of the Forest Service. Freel had spent a good part of his long career working near the condor refuge, where he’d watched Igor dodge the proverbial bullet many times. Freel remembered the dirges that ran in the papers when Igor was captured and taken to the zoo, and he knew there was a chance that this maneuver might not have a happy ending.

  “What if he dies?” Freel said, silencing the muttering in the back of the room. “AC-9 has now spent more than half his life in captivity, and we really don’t know what it’s done to him. There’s no way to predict what he will do in the Sespe for the first time in fifteen years.”

  There was only one point on which everybody in the room agreed. If Igor did go home, he’d find it hard to lose those pesky human trackers. Field crews in the Sespe had just finished testing a tracking system built around a thirty-five-gram satellite transmitter, which had been attached to the right wing of the Matriarch. She was still attached to a set of old-fashioned transmitters, but the satellite beeper had been putting it to
shame. Condors wearing the satellite transmitters never flew out of tracking range; anytime anybody wanted to know where a satellite bird had been, all they had to do was turn on the computer and download the latest tracking map. The bird with the thirty-five-gram device would appear as a blip at the end of a line that looked like it belonged on an Etch-A-Sketch: it would be a record of every flight the bird had made. In the past, the only way to make these maps was to trap the birds and download the data from their transmitters; this was a change that seemed to make it safer and easier to study the tagged birds. But as anyone who’s ever worked with condors understands, these birds always zig just when you think they’re going to zag.

  Mike Clark, the condor keeper at the Los Angeles Zoo, carried a portable dog kennel into Igor’s pen on the morning of February 4,2002. Not long afterward, a helicopter carried Clark and his cargo past the San Fernando Valley and the south edge of Topa Topa Mountain, touching down near the edge of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Clark hopped out and carried Igor’s kennel into a wood-and-wire holding pen. Three young condors raised in zoos were already there. At first the zoo-breds kept their distance from Igor, knowing he would show them who was boss. By the end of the day, they were following him and trying to copy his movements.

  Two weeks later, the four condors were moved to a larger pen in a valley in the Hopper Mountain Refuge. Field biologists and volunteers grabbed the birds, bolting on the ID tags and radio transmitters. When they finished, Igor was pumped.

  “He was flying all around the pen,” said a volunteer named Anthony Pietro. “Then he was up at the top of the pen, holding on to it with his beak. For a minute we thought he was going to break his beak. He was totally going berserk.”

  Just before dawn on the following morning, the birds were moved to a release pen on the lip of a cliff in the center of the sanctuary. Through a wire door on the front of the pen the birds looked across a canyon at Koford’s O.P., one of the wildest places left on Earth. They saw the hills cracked open by the earthquakes and the washes carved by prehistoric floods. Much of the chaparral had never been cut and never would be.

  Then there were the cliffs and the caves. This was a landscape defined by cliffs of almost every shape and size, and by an even wider range of caves. Some were huge and easy to reach. Others were slits in polished walls. There were caves whose walls were lined with whitewash sprayed by long-dead condors, and caves that had never been used. Counting them was out of the question, I thought. It would be like counting the stars.

  Tony Pietro was watching the birds through a peephole in the back of the release pen. Now it was the zoo-breds that were skittering around and gnawing at the inside of the pen; Igor had walked straight from his kennel to the wire mesh door that opened out onto the Sespe and stood there surveying the landscape. “He looked to his left, to his right, up, down—he was totally recognizing it,” Pietro said. “I’m not a scientist, but it was like, ‘Hey, I remember this place.’”

  Igor would have seen the crowds of people gathering on a distant escarpment, just below Koford’s O.P. Chumash dancers, ranchers and activists, field biologists and breeders, yet no one from the Peregrine Fund. Someday they will have to explain what they were doing on the day Igor finally came home. The California field crews took their absence as an insult, as did I.

  The man Igor would have seen at the outer edge of the escarpment was geneticist Oliver Ryder of the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species at the San Diego Zoo. He’d never been to the Sespe, and the only condor he’d ever seen outside a zoo was the one perched on the roof of a house. The big guy was Bruce Palmer, the director of the condor recovery team; the people crowding around him were reporters. The Chumash dancers were moving in circles near the point of the escarpment, chanting songs the condor could not hear.

  A smaller group had gathered at the top of a rise near the other end of the escarpment. The short guy with the beard was Jon Schmitt. I was standing next to him. Next to me was Pete Bloom, staring through his sighting scope at the front of the release pen and mumbling under his breath. I never had a chance to ask him what he was saying but I think I can guess: Bloom was probably talking to his bird.

  The door on the front of the release pen was opened by an unseen hand at 11 A.M. on May 1, 2002. The condors hatched and reared in zoos hopped out right away and flew down to a ledge. But Igor would not leave the doorway. He was still standing in the shadows of the pen when I left the area. Late that afternoon an impatient biologist entered the release pen and nudged Igor out into the world.

  The condor known as the Matriarch, Igor’s mate in the early 1980s when they were among the last free-flying condors on Earth, was shot and killed on February 13, 2003. The Matriarch was roughly forty when she died. She’d been released in the wild several years before, in the hope that she would teach the misbehaving zoo-breds to act like wild condors. At first she had refused to do any such thing, avoiding the other birds and shooing them away when they came around. The satellite readings showed that she was following her old flight paths to familiar foraging grounds, some of which had lost their carcasses forever in the fourteen years the Matriarch had been away. But in time she’d become a mentor to the younger birds, soaring in their company and showing them her roosts. Trappers had been forced to take her in fall 2000 when blood tests showed that she had a potentially lethal amount of lead in her veins and arteries. When the lead was removed and the bird was re-released in December 2000, you could almost hear the field crews and keepers breathe a sigh of relief.

  When Igor was moved to a holding pen in the Sespe just before he was released, the Matriarch had landed on the roof and pulled at the mesh above her old breeding partner. Now, nearly a year later, she was a twisted carcass wedged between a pair of branches near the top of a thirty-foot oak tree on the Tejon Ranch, forty-five minutes north of Hopper Mountain Refuge. A single bullet had passed through her torso and then through her left wing.

  Nobody admitted to the crime. Then investigators stood the carcass up on the perch where she’d been killed, tracing the path of the bullet back to where the shooter had likely stood. There they found a rifle shell that led police to the home of a twenty-nine-year-old man who denied firing the shot, even though he had been hunting pigs on the Tejon Ranch that day. After meeting with his lawyer, Britton Cole Lewis changed his mind and admitted that he’d shot the Matriarch. But Lewis swore he didn’t know the giant black bird in the oak tree was a California condor. Lewis lived in a town where local hunters would have known that turkey vultures don’t have ten-foot wingspans, and the Tejon Ranch says it makes a point of telling visitors not to shoot the giant vultures.

  Condor biologists had trouble buying Lewis’s story, but federal prosecutors apparently did not. Instead of charging him with a felony violation of the U.S. Endangered Species Act, they accused Lewis of violating the much less powerful Migratory Bird Treaty Act. ESA convictions can mean more jail time and much heavier fines, but they’re hard to obtain when prosecutors can’t prove the killings were intentional: in other words, when hunters caught dead to rights want to neutralize the ESA, all they have to do is say they pulled the trigger before they knew what they were killing.

  Lewis was sentenced to sixty hours probation, a five-thousand-dollar fine, and two hundred hours of community service. At the sentencing he said he was sorry and wished he could take back what he’d done.

  The last time I saw Igor he was soaring near my old hometown of Piru, at the base of the Topa Topa mountain range in south-central California. I saw him circling slowly around a rising column of wind in the middle of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. When he reached the top of it, he seemed to pause and scan the wildlands below him. Then he flexed his wings and veered off to the south, toward the smog.

  AFTERWORD

  Sophie Osborne pulled the garbage can with the carcass of the stillborn calf inside it out of the back of the pickup truck she’d parked near the edge of the Vermilion Cliffs. The can had a pair of shoulder straps att
ached to the side of it; Osborne grabbed them and swung the can up onto her back. Then she hustled off across a red plateau strewn with ankle-breaking rocks. From behind, it looked a bit like she was skipping.

  Osborne is the Peregrine Fund biologist who took Shawn Farry’s place in the field, when he quit his job to work with Mike Wallace at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and then quit that job to work with monk seals in the South Pacific. Early in 2001, the first recorded California condor egg was produced in the wild since the last of the free-flying birds were trapped in the 1980s. It was a milestone the recovery team had been praying for since the released zoo-breds had gotten old enough to breed in the wild.

  “I noticed that the pair of condors had stopped flying together and settled into a cave,” she said. “When one was foraging the other always stayed behind in the cave. When the foraging bird came back to the cave, its mate would fly away. When they alternate like that, it usually means they’re guarding an egg.”

  Osborne began trembling when it dawned on her that she was almost certainly looking at an active condor nest site. News of the event shot through the recovery team like an electric power surge. Then the parent birds appeared to kill the egg. Osborne saw the parent condors fighting near the entrance to the cave one afternoon. One of them went inside and came back out a short time later with the egg impaled on its beak.

  One year later, an Arizona breeding pair laid an egg in a cave inside the colossal rock formation called the Battleship in the heart of the Grand Canyon, while at least two other condor eggs were laid in California. A chick emerged from one of the eggs produced in California, but it died before it was old enough to fly. Spokesmen for the program said that they hadn’t expected the eggs to produce a fledgling, given that first attempts like these rarely added up to much.