Condor Read online

  It would have looked like a free-for-all to most of us, but in truth, it probably wasn’t. Over the millennia, the birds in the condor’s scavenging guild evolved in ways that led them to open spots on carcasses—places inaccessible to other kinds of birds.

  The condors would have eaten until they were so groggy that any attempt at a running takeoff would likely end in their tripping and falling flat on their faces. You might have seen a few of them trying it anyway, running and flapping their wings, but when they couldn’t get up high enough to find some wind, they would have landed and started again.

  When the mammoths and the sloths and the saber-toothed cats disappeared ten thousand years ago, the scavenging guild went with them. The only giant left, the condor, may have been declining ever since. For instance, the evidence Emslie found in the caves of the Grand Canyon seems to show the bird wasn’t there for long.

  “I found the partial skeletons of three different condor chicks in one of these caves,” Emslie said, “and all around these skeletons we found condor eggshell fragments. This was a cave that had been used by the birds on at least an intermittent basis for several hundred years, and as we continued to look around, we found the things the birds were eating. There was a chip of a mastodon tooth in one of the pack-rat middens, and a bone shard from the humerus of an extinct bison. Clearly these animals couldn’t have climbed up into caves like these. Condors must have flown them up in pieces for their young.”

  Emslie’s lead climber, Larry Coats, says what may have been the most dramatic find came near the end of the two-year expedition. He and Emslie had just scrambled into a place called Stevens’ Cave, named for the climber who left it in a panic after something made a moaning noise and blew his torch out. Coats found the source of that moan when he crawled into a tunnel at the back of the cave—it dumped him out into a secondary cavern that was full of fossilized goat skulls. Coats whirled around when he heard the moan and felt a blast of air—both were coming from a narrow crack that extended out through the cave face. When the wind outside blew a certain way, the moan rose again.

  Shortly after that, the lamp attached to the helmet Coats was wearing passed over something oddly white and oblong. It was the skull of a very large bird, half buried in the dirt. Coats yelled for Emslie.

  “He bent down to look at the skull, which was partially buried,” Coats said. “After a few seconds he yelled out, ‘It’s a goose!’ Then he picked it up and blew off the dust.”

  It was a perfect condor skull. Emslie whooped with joy. “It was amazingly well preserved,” Coats said. “There were bits of tissue hanging off the jaw, and it was completely intact. It looked like the skull of a bird that had died ten or twenty years ago, but when we got the radio-carbon test results back, they indicated it was roughly twelve thousand five hundred years old.”

  Every single condor bone that Emslie found in the caves turned out to be at least ten thousand years old. This was potentially bad news for the people who had hoped to put condors back into the canyon, since it wasn’t likely that a ten-thousand-year-old nest would qualify as proof of “recent” residency. The backers of the condor restoration plan were deeply disappointed, and Emslie didn’t know what to tell them.

  “What was I supposed to do,” Emslie said to me. “Lie about my findings?”

  Emslie says his work in the caves helped show what caused the condor’s range to collapse: the hunters who marched across the Bering landmass ten thousand years ago. Emslie thinks these early hunters caused an animal apocalypse by methodically killing off most of the continent’s giant mammals.

  In professional circles, this scenario is known as the Pleistocene blitzkrieg hypothesis, which means it moved like lightning and left little but wreckage in its wake. Next to the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out when a giant meteor crashed into Earth, it’s easily the most controversial theory in the history of extinction studies.

  Emslie didn’t buy this theory when he first heard it. But when he found the bones in the caves, he changed his mind. The bits of mastodon and sloth he found showed that condors needed giant herbivores, at least in the Grand Canyon; the speed with which the condors vanished showed that early hunters wiped out the giant herbivores. Nothing else could move so quickly and selectively, he says.

  “Humans are the only real problem these birds have ever had,” he told me. “And that’s important. People who think the condor is declining naturally might find it easier to just let the birds go. ‘Death with dignity’—isn’t that the phrase? I think that’s ridiculous. If this species really does have one wing in the grave, it’s because we jammed it down there.”

  It’s a wonder they’re still with us, I said. By the way, why is that? How did condors manage to survive the change that killed the other giant birds?

  Go to California, Emslie said. So I did.

  October 19, 2001—10:47 A.M.: I am stuck in off-peak traffic on the Golden State Freeway near an outlet mall disguised as an Egyptian temple. As a native of this area, I think this is wrong: those walls were supposed to hide a tire factory.

  Sitting in my rental car, I think about a scientist I interviewed once, ten or fifteen years ago. His name was John Heyning, and when we met, he drove a modified flatbed truck he called the whalemobile. When dead whales washed up on the region’s beaches, Heyning cleared away the crowds and hauled the carcasses off to a warehouse in east Los Angeles. He used to joke that this was the only city on Earth where you could drive a truck with a whale on the back of it and not have anybody notice. He used to say he wanted to pull into a McDonald’s and ask for a bun.

  And here’s the funny part: if a California condor were to soar above the city of Los Angeles today, a dead cetacean on the back of a truck might be the only thing it recognized. Whales are probably the things that saved these birds when the era of the supersize herbivores ended. Carcasses the size of mastodons washed up on the beaches all the time back then. They may have been all the condors needed.

  “It can’t be proved,” said Heyning when I called him on my cell phone. “But, I think it may be true.” Ten thousand years ago, there were a lot of right whales swimming close to the Pacific Coast, and a lot of gray whales as well. Fur seals, harbor seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals were abundant, and there were many more sharks.

  “Condors couldn’t have gotten through the hides of the whale on their own,” he continued. “On the other hand, they wouldn’t have had to.” Short-faced bears and eagles would have raced the condors to the beach when the carcass of a whale washed up, ripping holes so big that the careless might have slipped and disappeared into the mounds of blubber. After the Pleistocene, grizzly bears came down in the night to make those openings.

  Centuries after that, Los Angeles is doing its best to make it look as if none of these events could have happened. This is a city always pretending to be something other than what it used to be. From the Pacific to the mountains, every bit of the landscape has been terraformed or paved and repaved. The rich, slow river that used to wander down through the center of the L.A. Basin has been straightened and lined with concrete. Flora and fauna were long ago replaced by gangs and movie crews.

  The traffic breaks. Not long afterward, I pull into a parking lot of the George C. Page Museum, home of the largest and most spectacular collection of Pleistocene fossils in the world. These bones were pulled from asphalt sumps like Pit 91, just a few steps outside the back door.

  The secrets these sumps held were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, when local cattlemen pulled what they thought were some very large cow bones out of one of them: bones with fifteen-foot-long curling tusks, or giant fangs.

  This is where Steve Emslie’s professional hero made his intellectual fortune. In the early 1900s, Miller wrote what’s still the most eloquent ode to the workings of the tar pits. It starts when a falcon swoops down at a mouse trapped by the sump: “Let the wingtip or a gasping talon break that deceptive surface,” Miller wrote, “and the
hunter is caught and sooner or later sinks with his quarry. The mouse is no more surely held than the mastodon or the ground sloth. The falcon is no more strongly attached than the sabertooth or the great American lion. Eventually there spread far downwind an odor that was attractive to [another species of bird]; he would swing hypnotically into the wind and to his own undoing.”

  I walk into the George C. Page Museum to see the skeletons in the glass cabinets: giant eagles, giant storks, and giant vultures. All but the condor have been gone for thousands of years, and at times the condor has seemed ready to follow. Few seem more convinced that it would happen soon than the great Loye Miller, who argued that the principal threat to condors was the passage of time.

  “Is not the California condor a senile species that is far past its prime? It was widely distributed and numerically abundant in Pleistocene times (in Florida, Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, California) but is now restricted to one or two localities and a numerable population of individuals within the Californias. Is not the condor a species with one foot and even one wing in the grave?”2

  Those words have been called a noose around the condor’s neck, and in a way it’s true. This is not a species that’s grown old and feeble—that’s scientific mumbo jumbo—but it is a creature that evolved to fit a world that’s disappeared. The condor is a relic of the Pleistocene epoch, not quite suited to the present day and age.

  But does this mean we ought to let the condor fade away? Hell no. I think it means we should do everything possible to keep the condor around. If you see one soaring, think of saber-toothed cats and giant mastodons. Then ask yourself this: “How much would I pay to get some of those animals back?”

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  MORE LIKE RELATIVES

  The molokbe enters the chief’s hut where the singer or drummer helps him pull on a feathered condor skin. He pushes his legs through holes in the stretched skin where the bird’s legs had been and he laces the skin up the front of his body. The great wings are tied to his arms and the head protrudes through the neck opening. The tail feathers drag on the ground…

  The molokbe dances slowly, his body moving up and down as he flexes his knees, circling the hut counterclockwise. He turns in various directions and raises his wings. Every few moments he makes a hissing noise, imitating the condor.

  —Dick Smith, Condor Journal: The

  History, Mythology, and Reality of the

  California Condor (Capra Press, 1978)

  Condors weren’t gods to the Indians. They had magical powers but they weren’t like gods. They were more like relatives.

  —Sid Flores, civil rights attorney, 2004

  Condors were a thousand times more important to the Indians than they are to you or me. This fact is underlined when anthropologists find the bones of condors in the graves of Indians, and when kids dig up ancient headdresses made of condor feathers out of the corners of caves. In California’s San Rafael Mountains, there’s an Indian painting of condors on the wall of a particular cave—when the sun rises on the day of the winter solstice every year, the first light that enters the cave lands just below that figure of the bird.

  Condors also play a crucial role in the stories told by tribal elders. But the roles they play vary wildly as you move across the state. Surviving members of the Wiyot tribe in Humboldt County, California, say it was the condor that created the present version of the human race, for example. They say Condor and his sister took the job when Above Old Man decided he didn’t like the people he’d created, and then resolved to kill them with a flood.1

  This flooding of the world was supposed to be a secret, but Condor managed to find out. According to the Wiyot storytellers, Condor and his sister prepared for the flood by weaving a large, deep covered basket. When the water rose, they got into the basket and sealed it up tight. When the basket stopped rocking and floating around, they opened it and got out. Condor’s sister became his wife, and when they bred, there were no eggs. Well-spoken, furless human babies were born instead, and Above Old Man was pleased.

  A white ethnographer recorded that story after speaking with the remnants of the Wiyot tribe, which was all but erased on February 26, 1860. That’s the day three groups of Yankee settlers armed with hatchets, guns, and knives attacked three different Wiyot settlements, killing whole Wiyot families as they slept. Shortly after that awful day, the U.S. Army herded the remaining Wiyot people through the gates of Fort Humboldt for their own protection.

  Members of the Wiyot tribe hold candlelight vigils every year on February 26. Stories about condors that survive catastrophes must have a special resonance to them.

  But Condor is also a destroyer of worlds, according to parts of the Mono tribe of Madera County, California. Their tale told that the Condor known to the Mono had a habit of scooping up people and carrying them back to a spring, where Condor would cut off their heads and drain their blood into the water. When the spring was full of blood, Condor always dug a ditch that led straight to Ground Squirrel’s house, which he always hoped to flood. Several ground squirrels would then try to flee, but Condor would catch them and fly them to the spring, where he would put them down and pause to take a drink of bloody water. While Condor is drinking, his daughter urges one of the ground squirrels to cut off her father’s head, which the ground squirrel manages to do. But when Condor’s head comes off, the bloody water he’s been drinking “runs forth in every direction,” drowning the entire world.

  Yet another kind of condor—call it version 3.0—tried to exterminate the human race but got his comeuppance in the end. Members of the Gashowu Yokuts tribe of south-central California said Condor was not only the love child of Coyote and Hawk, but was also a human gambler who shot an arrow at Owl, a powerful magician. Owl responded by causing big black feathers to sprout out of the body of the gambling man, who eventually turned into Condor and flew away. Condor, the former gambler, lived above the Earth, but sometimes he flew down to eat people. Then one day he flew home with three live children, two boys and a girl. At first he told his mother he intended to keep the children as his pets, but then he seemed to change his mind, telling his mother to fatten up the children so that he could eat them for dinner.

  Condor’s mother started to worry then: When Condor was done eating all the humans, would she herself be the next meal? She decided to get rid of her son and told the children to shoot arrows at him. They did, for half a day, yet Condor didn’t even notice. So Mother cut a hole in her son and they all climbed inside. That time, he felt something. Condor flew up and then crashed and died, and his mother and the children burned him. But his eyes burst out of his head and were lost in the brush. Had they been able to find those eyes and burn them in the fire, there would be no condors in the world.

  Of all the animals in all the stories told by California’s native tribes, only the condor follows such varied story lines. Coyotes were almost always tricksters, for example; grizzly bears, once or future people. But when a giant vulture flies into the stories, you never know what’s going to happen.

  Another example of the mythological condor’s many-splendorness comes from one of the many Yokut villages scattered through what’s known as the San Joaquin Valley. This Condor not only tried to kidnap Prairie Falcon’s wife but also tried to steal the job of chief from Eagle.

  Storytellers from the Chumash tribe of Southern California said the condor started out as an all-white bird that turned black when it flew too close to a fire. Meanwhile, the condor of the Northfork Meno was picking up sleeping people and taking them to a “sky-land,” never to return. The wings of the Yokut condor caused eclipses, and sometimes he ate the moon.

  This is why the condor is the perfect symbol for the state’s divergent Native American tribes. Roughly thirty languages diverged here into more than 130 dialects, so that in most parts of California all you had to do to reach a different language group was walk fifty-one miles. Communities that held more than five hundred people were considered exceptional. Communities
of more than a thousand Indians were almost unheard of. Where there was game, these Native Americans hunted; where there were fish, they fished. When wild meat was scarce, they preserved their food, smoking and storing it in big communal warehouses. Loosely affiliated Native Americans rooted themselves in hundreds of “microclimates,” usually finding peaceful ways to make the best use of them; in 1769, when Father Junipero Serra toured the state, three hundred thousand Indians were living there in relative harmony. They built no pyramids, formed no empires, and never had tribal councils. They never worshipped Tlaloc or Quetzalcoatl. They failed to invent the wheel.

  Instead, they thrived in ways that tended to preserve the richness of the various worlds they occupied. The Native American tribes did burn off the forests, and they sometimes overfished and overhunted. But they didn’t do it anywhere near as often as the white settlers did, and by most accounts the damage was not lasting. It’s possible that over several thousand years, only one species was put in jeopardy by the California Indians: that was the California condor.

  Death by veneration was a common fate in the era of the Native Americans. There was no doubt the word “death” had a different meaning for them. Most of the state’s Indian tribes thought the world consisted of three levels, with the spirit world on top and the physical Earth in the middle. Below the Earth lived powerful and typically malevolent creatures that came out at night. And to the Indians, all three of these worlds were real. Animals were always moving back and forth among them, as were special people called shamans, who knew how to borrow powers from the animals, making it possible to travel to the upper and lower worlds.