Condor Page 3

  Inside the compound the rows of tall wire flight pens were covered on all sides with plywood. Fourteen California condors were living in those pens at the start of 1987, leading what captive-breeding expert Bill Toone said were quiet, uneventful lives. Like Mike Wallace, Toone had been studying condors for most of his career, preparing for the day when the future of the species would be in the hands of the zoos. He was absolutely certain the wild birds would breed.

  “No doubt whatsoever,” he said. “We’d spent years working Andean condors, and they were breeding prolifically. California condors were different birds, but not that different.”

  But Toone was also a nervous wreck in 1987. Tensions on the field teams were alarmingly high, and he was sick of being portrayed as a “condor cager,” ignorant of the need to save habitats as well as birds.

  Toone said he had always shared David Brower’s urge to save more of the condor’s rangelands, even though he didn’t think there was a shortage of protected condor habitat. What he didn’t share—what he detested—was the idea that the zoos had been plotting to capture all the condors for decades now. He blamed Brower and his allies for the condor decline, noting that they had snuffed a plan to breed a very small number of California condors in captivity in the early 1950s. Those would have hatched a lot of eggs, Toone argued—many more than they would have been able to produce in the wild. Those captive chicks would have grown up into condors that could have been released into the wild, said Toone. By the late 1980s, they’d have been thriving out there.

  The magnitude of what it meant to take a condor out of the wild hit Toone one day in the mid-1980s when he climbed into a condor sanctuary to get to an egg a condor had just laid on the floor of a craggy-looking cave. Toone and biologist Noel Snyder were planning to take the egg to a zoo where it would be hatched and raised. When the two men reached the cave, they noticed the mother of the egg was inside watching over it. Toone and Snyder hid and waited until the mother condor flew away. But, as soon as they entered the cave, Toone heard a vaguely musical roar approaching the cave entrance. He turned to see the mother condor swooping back and forth past the opening, hoping to make the egg thieves go away.

  A wave of doubt washed over Toone at that moment. “It occurred to me that there was a living embryo in this egg—if it hatched in captivity, it would spend most of its life in a pen that was no more than forty feet wide, eighty feet long, and twenty-two feet tall, and this was a bird that soared at altitudes measured by the mile. In that instant I promised myself I’d stay with the program until a bird raised in captivity was released to the wild. Then I would walk away.”

  Near the end Pete Bloom had a recurring nightmare: Igor lands on the carcass and Bloom catches him easily, but then he trips and falls on top of the bird, killing it instantly. Next thing he knows he is standing in front of a microphone at a press conference, looking out at glaring lights and hundreds of reporters. The press conference is endless, but there’s only one question: How did it feel to kill the last free-flying condor?

  Bloom had been waiting in the clammy darkness of the pit trap for several months now, but Igor had not taken the bait. The last free-flying condor saw the carcass, and he often circled down a bit to take a closer look. But he must not have liked what he was seeing down there—after a few minutes, most of the time, he would turn and fly away.

  No one in the condor program was surprised to hear that Igor was the last bird left. He’d been closely watched and tracked since the day he hatched in the wild, and he’d always been remarkably independent, if a little klutzy. “When he was young, he was a very friendly, curious bird,” said Bloom. “It was easy to approach him.” Bloom says Igor’s friendly disposition held when the condor started looking for a mate. It kept holding when Igor’s first attempts to breed went nowhere, partly because his mating dance seemed to go on forever, and partly because he kept attempting to mount his partners from the front.

  Then in the eighties, the trapping started and Igor was never the same. Bloom says Igor was captured twice by people hidden in pit traps; once for blood tests, and once to have radio transmitters bolted to his wings. After those events, when approaching a carcass, Igor was exceptionally cautious, sometimes watching other vultures eat for days from the top of nearby roost trees.

  Bloom said he’d looked up and seen this condor looking down as the other condors were captured. No one knows what the condor learned by watching other birds, but Bloom had a hunch his bird had learned to see the pit traps from the air. Maybe the mound of earth that covered Bloom’s viewing basket was the clue that gave the traps away. Maybe it was the way the cannon nets were always buried.

  Bloom also gave some thought to another explanation: maybe someone on the trapping team was tipping Igor off. “All you’d have to do was take a tiny mirror out and flash the sun into the condor’s eyes. You might also make a sudden movement when nobody on the ground was looking. I was pretty paranoid for a while there.”

  Bloom and his crew built a new kind of trap in April 1987; the pit and the viewing basket weren’t placed so close to the carcass, and a row of small cannons rigged to fire a big net over the carcass was added and disguised as bushes. A long, buried black cord connected to the first cannon ran over to the pit trap and into the bottom of a plastic tube with a red button on top. Bloom held the trigger as he waited.

  Igor did a lot of wandering in April 1987, sometimes flying north along the crooked spine of California’s coastal mountains, or winding west through the Transverse Ranges. ID tags with great big 9s on them hung from the front of his wings, and a radio transmitter was bolted onto the left wing. Teams of Igor trackers in pickup trucks had been chasing the beeps sent from the transmitter, but for weeks the last free-flying condor had toyed with them. Sometimes he hovered over the pickups, looking down at them. Then he’d turn and disappear over the top of a roadless mountain for several days, panicking his would-be captors.

  Bloom’s hopes rose on April 18, when Igor landed on a dead branch at the top of a tree near a trap. The bird stared down at the carcass for a while, but then he flew away. Bloom sent the crew home so some of them could spend the next day celebrating Easter. When Bloom was home he got a call from a radio tracker named Jan Hamber, who told him that Igor had returned to the tree and fallen asleep. Bloom immediately called the trapping crew back into the field.

  Igor woke up late the next morning, as condors are wont to do. He lounged around and spread his wings to catch the sun, never leaving his perch. Several hours later, as if on a whim, he stepped off his branch and floated down toward the carcass. He landed just beyond the range of a big mesh trap net attached to four small cannons. He paused to look around for what Bloom remembers as an eternity.

  And then the condor clomped past the basket and planted one of his fat pink feet on top of the carcass. After one more look around, Igor whipped his beak down, burying his head inside the carcass. For an instant, he was blind and deaf. Bloom pushed the button that fired the net.

  Four bushes seemed to explode. A thin black line sailed out of the ground between the bushes, spreading out into a net as it arced over Igor’s head. As the bird began to run, there was another crash, and a bearded man flew up out of the ground.

  Igor, running and flapping his wings, was one step from the edge of the net when Pete Bloom caught him. With his right arm, he closed the wings; his left hand closed the beak. When someone slipped a hood over Igor’s head, the last wild condor stopped fighting.

  Not long afterward, Igor was locked inside a medium-size dog kennel and driven to the Oxnard airport, in Ventura County. There he was loaded into a plane that did not go to Los Angeles, where activists were ready to rattle the fences at the Los Angeles Zoo, but to an airport in a rural part of San Diego County, the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Wallace and Toone had secretly agreed to make the switch to avoid the scene up in Los Angeles. By the time the demonstrators figured it out, it was way too late, said Wallace. No demonstrations were reported.
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  The stories that ran in the papers the next morning read like eulogies, which seemed appropriate. No matter what happened to the birds in the future, April 19, 1987, would now be marked as a low point in American environmental history. And here’s what I have always considered the saddest thing about it: of the tens of millions of people now living in the condor’s former rangeland, few know what condors are. Fewer still know what the condor used to be, or why that’s so incredibly important.

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  WING IN A GRAVE

  The story of our condor will be reckoned from the wondertime of North American fauna, the Pleistocene, the final epoch of the 70-million-year-long Cenozoic era. Seldom has animal life known more fascinating diversity or greater numbers than during this epoch. Men living today who have an interest in such things can but weep for not having seen it. We can know it only from the mountains of bones.

  —Roger Caras, Source of the Thunder:

  The Biography of a California Condor

  Drenched in sweat and unsure of his sanity, Dr. Steve Emslie wedged his feet into a notch in the cliff and waited out the wind. Several hundred feet below him, the Colorado River twisted south through the bottom of a dark red canyon. Emslie saw the boatman who had brought him down the river standing at the water’s edge. Damn, did he look small.

  “I was wondering where my partners had gone,” Emslie said, referring to the professional rock climbers he had hired to take care of him. “I was not a practiced climber, and I was not sure what to do.”

  Emslie was trying to get to a cave on the outskirts of the Grand Canyon National Park. In that cave, he hoped to find evidence that the Grand Canyon area had once been a condor nirvana, where the giant birds had found plenty to eat, lots of company, and many caves in which to lay their eggs. Condors like caves that can’t be reached by wingless predators, and there seem to be an infinite number of caves like that in the Grand Canyon area. Some are thousands of feet above the dark green river, many are hundreds of thousands of years old, and the range of shapes they take is dazzling. There are caves with multiple entrances, caves hidden behind boulders, and caves that lead into huge caverns. Many had never felt the weight of a human foot, and a few had spooky reputations: one of the caves Dr. Emslie wanted to enter led back into a cavern that produced an eerie moaning noise.

  Caves in the walls of the Grand Canyon have been dry for many thousands of years. Animals that die inside them decompose very slowly, to the point where bits of skin and hair sometimes hang from the skeletons of prehistoric animals. Clues to what the landscape and the weather were like when these animals lived can be found in crusty heaps in the corners: ancient pack-rat middens made of sticks, leaves, bones, and feathers, along with anything else the rats could carry up into the cave.

  Emslie hoped to find the bones of long-dead condors in these caves, along with the bones of the things they ate. He wanted to know more about the lives these condors led—what they ate and where they nested. He also hoped to figure out when they had left the canyon, and if he was lucky, why. But first he’d have to get off the ledge he was on.

  He was connected to the other climbers by a safety rope, but the rope was long and he couldn’t see to the other end of it. Lacking a plan, he froze, felt the wind try one more time to pry him free of his perch. Giant wings would come in handy here, he thought.

  When Emslie started up this cliff in 1986, it was known that condors had once ranged not only up and down almost all the Pacific Coast but across parts of the Rocky Mountains and along the Gulf Coast. Condor bones had been unearthed in Florida and in upstate New York. Emslie thought the first true condors had evolved in North America about eleven million years ago, branching into the modern genus Gymnogyps eight million years later. He believed these North American condors found their way to South America, where they split off and formed not only a new species but a separate genus. These became known as Andeans, with slightly different markings, slightly larger wings, and a tendency to kill and eat small animals.

  Then, at the end of the Pleistocene, the bird’s range imploded. No one knows why or how, he says, but one thing is certain: change arrived with what geologists think of as blinding speed.

  Emslie wanted to look in the caves for clues to what happened. When he began his study, the bones of remarkably well-preserved condors had already been found in some of the canyon’s more accessible caves, along with Indian artifacts and the bones of other kinds of animals. Many experts thought that meant the condor hung on in these caves until the late nineteenth century, or even until the start of the twentieth century. That would put the condors in the region when the first groups of humans settled in the canyon four thousand years ago. Those birds would have seen the Anasazi culture thrive in the Vermilion Cliffs for roughly two thousand years, and then watched whatever it was that caused the Anasazi to vanish without a trace.

  This was a politically important story line in the late 1980s. Rumors of federal plans to start releasing condors in the area had just begun to circulate, and many of the people who lived near the canyon weren’t sure they liked the idea. Some of the most vocal critics didn’t think the feds had the right to return condors to a place they’d left many thousands of years before. Lawsuits that might press that point would not get very far if proof of recent nesting could be found. Bits of condor eggshell dating back one hundred years might be enough to do the trick; condor bones that stopped appearing ten thousand years ago might be enough to stop the project entirely. What the feds needed most was proof that condors had laid eggs and raised chicks in the canyon recently, which seemed to mean sometime in the last fifty to one hundred years. Finding the bones of adult condors would not be enough, since an adult could have been transient and died while passing through. The bones of a chick might be plenty of evidence, on the other hand. Tiny fragments of a condor eggshell might also be enough.

  Emslie didn’t enter the condor caves to settle a political argument, but he definitely had the skills he’d need to do it. In the 1980s, he filled an esoteric niche in the ornithological world, being one of the world’s experts on the bones of long-dead condors. This was a man who knew how to sort fossilized droppings by species and to identify the tiniest condor bone on sight. If the caves held any proof at all of condor nesting, he would find it—assuming he didn’t kill himself on his way to the caves.

  Emslie’s professional hero was the late Loye Miller, who was one of the first to find the fossilized bones of condors, in the early 1900s. Miller was a dapper, genial man, known to students and colleagues as “Padre,” an eloquent writer who thought of old rocks and fossilized bones as great works of art. In an essay entitled “Ornithology in the Looking Glass,” he wrote of “the enlargement of the spirit” that comes “with the growing concept of ornithology as extending backward into an almost imponderable past—fauna preceding fauna, shifting with shifting scene.”

  That’s what Emslie was chasing after when he got stuck on that ledge: bones that pointed back into this “almost imponderable past.” Retracing his steps, he started edging backward, hoping the synthetic rope around his waist would lead him back to the guides.

  “That was when the chunk of rock broke off above my head,” he said. “It fell between my feet and smashed into the ledge, right on top of the rope. I thought, Great, if that rope’s broken, I’m a dead man.”

  Turned out the rope wasn’t broken. Not long afterward, Emslie pulled himself into a cave that contained not only the bones of long-dead adult condors but the bones of a condor fledgling that had died in its nest. Scattered around the cave were bits of condor eggshell fragments and the bones of giant sloths.

  “It was as if I’d entered a museum,” Emslie said.

  The Pleistocene epoch was the condor’s prime. The lands beneath the soaring birds were littered with the carcasses of mammals bigger than any seen before or since. Giant flying scavengers such as the condor would have led one another to these carcasses and then methodically turned the carcasses into pi
les of bones.1

  It’s hard to fathom how big some of these carcasses were. Consider the largest species of North American mammoth. Alive, it sometimes weighed ten tons and stood fourteen feet high, with fourteen-foot-long tusks curving around like giant fishhooks. The mammoth’s smaller cousin, the mastodon, weighed only six tons by comparison, but the distance from the ground to its shoulders sometimes measured ten feet. Giant ground sloths ambling up from South America were as big as modern elephants.

  There were many more of these cartoon beasts, ranging from tiny prehistoric horses to ridiculously oversize bison. Huge camels with puny humps roamed near llamas with enormous heads; caravans of deerlike creatures known as pronghorn traveled under moving fields of giant antlers.

  The carnivores that killed these creatures were impressive in their own right, starting with the saber-toothed cats that used their seven-inch fangs like matching pairs of daggers, and moving right along to the carnivorous bears with faces that belonged on pit bulls—bears that would have towered over the biggest of the present-day grizzlies. Then there were the packs of dire wolves that crushed the bones of their prey with viselike jaws.

  When the scavenging birds started boiling down, they must have blackened the sky. Ravens and small vultures would find the carcass first, drawn by the smell of the kill. Some would circle just beyond the reach of the cats in a way that might have signaled bigger birds. Other small vultures would be gathering near the wounds that would attract the big birds, hoping to grab what bits of meat were thrown clear of the melee.

  Soon, much bigger scavenging birds would start converging on the carcass, having smelled it or seen the smaller vultures. It’s possible that hundreds of birds would be circling the carcass. Eagles with eight- and nine-foot wingspans might dive straight into the crowd, tearing at the choicest bits with their sharp hooked beaks and long, curved talons. When the hides were split, the rest of the birds began moving into position. Storks with extralong beaks started digging into the deepest wounds; other birds raced in from the sides to steal meat out of beaks. Some of the birds might have crawled all the way into the carcass. Condors would have vacuumed their meals out of wounds, opening them wider in the process.