Condor Page 5

  Borrowing usually meant killing the condor in ritualistic ways, making ceremonial clothing out of its feathers and skin. Shamans danced under sacred wings and feathered capes that sometimes reached the ground. By some accounts, only shamans were allowed to touch these magical items. When particular shamans died, the clothes were said to become cursed.

  Shrill-sounding whistles made of condor bones were sometimes played while the shamans danced, strutting slowly and bobbing their heads like the real birds do when they are trying to attract a mate. Many tribes believed that the birds they had killed were brought back to life by the dances: somewhere in the mountains, presumably, they simply reappeared.

  No one will ever know how many condors died this way. But one camp of condor experts thinks that the birds might have benefited from the killing rituals and dances. These scholars say there’s scattered evidence that some tribes stopped killing when the condors seemed to be disappearing. Some of these same tribes were said to treat local condors as invaluable community property. It’s also possible that when the native tribes burned the six-foot grasses off their hunting lands, they may have helped the condors by making it easier for them to find food.

  But the authors of a recent book on condors take a much more pessimistic view. Noel Snyder, a well-known biologist who was once codirector of the California Condor Recovery Program, says crude calculations seem to show that the rituals hurt the condor badly. After dividing the number of square miles in the condor’s historic range by the number of miles occupied by the average tribe of Indians, Snyder and coauthor Helen Snyder concluded that as many as seven hundred different Indian tribal groups could have occupied the condor’s rangelands. If even a tenth of those tribes killed condors on a regular basis, the impact would have been huge. “We believe,” they wrote in 2001, “that earlier use of condors for ritual purposes may have substantially depressed local condor populations, leading to a continuous overall population decline long before the arrival of the Europeans. Prior to such persecution, condors may have been much more abundant than indicated by any of the historical records.”2

  In 1986, as the last free-flying condors were being trapped and taken to zoos, a group of people who identified themselves as members of the Coastal Clan of the Chumash Nation came forward with a list of demands. No one at the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs had ever heard of this clan, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real: there had been a time when the Chumash culture dominated large parts of Southern and central California. Ethnographers and Indians agreed that condors were extremely important to the Chumash: when “great chiefs” died, great condors flew them to the Land of the Dead. However, condors needed to be killed to make the journey. This released the condor’s supernatural powers, allowing it to fly great distances in small amounts of time.

  But this was not the condor known to the self-declared members of the Coastal Chumash Clan; theirs was a bird whose demise in the wild would kill the Chumash culture. The leader of the Coastal Clan, a man named John Sespe, demanded that the trapping cease. When it did not, he warned that great disasters would befall them all.

  Not long afterward, an angry group of twenty activists and Indians gathered near the Ventura County office of the California Condor Recovery Program, chanting and disrupting traffic, and handing out flyers that denounced the trapping plan as a violation of religious rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and of Native American rights guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.3

  One such release read as follows:

  The American people are asked to remember that the condors and the Chumash people, as well as other tribes in California, long predated the US government. As such we call upon the peace [leader] of this nation, the President of the United States, to order his executive branch to immediately cease and desist from capturing the California condor.

  A lawyer named Sid Flores, speaking for the activists, was meeting with officials all over the state. In Sacramento, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles, Flores asked that the Coastal Chumash be granted a permanent seat on the Condor Recovery Program, be given permission to watch field biologists wait inside the traps, be awarded exemptions from the law that makes it a felony to own a condor feather, and be offered some of the funding in a condor conservation bill that never made it through the state legislature. Flores said his clients did not seek to undo conservation measures that were already in effect, but they did not want to go along with the plan to send the last birds to the zoo. Flores’s clients wanted the last three condors taken out of the zoos and released on Santa Catalina Island, a wildlife refuge west of the Ventura coast. Santa Catalina is considered sacred land by many Chumash, including those officially recognized by the federal government. While the Chumash activists Flores spoke for were not members of a recognized clan, the California Native American Heritage Commission seconded their demands.

  “When the condors are gone so are the Chumash,” said John Sespe of the Coastal Chumash Clan at a meeting called to calm things down. Sespe then declared that the members of the California Condor Recovery team had committed acts of sacrilege by trapping and handling condors without Chumash overseers on hand. He hinted that his group would go to court to halt the program if they didn’t get satisfaction. Furthermore, he added, greater forces were at play here. “Condors control the weather,” he said. “If you take them away the weather will do terrible things, I’m telling you.”

  The unofficial Chumash activists would have faced an uphill battle in court, in part because the same laws that protect their religious rights would have required them to prove that their ideas about condors had deep roots. It might not have been enough to say that a dead uncle had told stories about condors that controlled the weather, or about condors that ceased to exist when they left the wild. Chumash scholars called forth by the government could have argued that there were no hints of stories like these in notes taken by the old ethnographers. Environmental activists from groups such as Earth First! had spoken of the condor as a “Thunderbird” with the power to affect the weather, and one or two writers had made the comparison back in the early 1970s. But as far as anyone could tell, there was no Chumash condor with the powers of a Thunderbird. Cynics might have noted that this was the kind of condor you’d invent to stop a trapping program.

  But the people who ran the Condor Recovery Program at the time knew they had a potentially catastrophic public-relations situation on their hands. The question wasn’t whether the fight could be won, but how to make it go away. Although they hadn’t said so publicly, the leaders of the recovery team were appalled by the proposal to move three condors to Santa Catalina Island, mostly because they didn’t think the birds would have had a chance in hell of surviving there. Condors aren’t built to fly on the winds that swirl over the ocean, and Santa Catalina wasn’t big enough to serve as anything other than a glorified outdoor cage. The team members weren’t much happier about the proposal to allow a “medicine elder” to perform a special ceremony at the site of every condor capture, as there was always a chance that holding a bird in one-hundred-degree heat for the extra half hour needed to perform the ceremony might seriously injure it. Representatives of these groups were told they couldn’t do a special dance at the point of capture, but they were welcome to follow the trapping teams on any federal lands and on private lands if owners gave their permission. Unfortunately, the last of the condors was caught on a ranch whose owners refused to give the Indians permission to go on the land. For several days the Indians waited in a car near the entrance to the ranch, and when they finally abandoned their post, they handed an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a special ceremonial powder, tasking him to sprinkle it on the bird if it was captured.

  Pete Bloom caught Igor the next morning. The ceremonial powder provided by the tribal leaders was sprinkled onto Igor’s back at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

  four

  SWAY OF KINGDOMS

  Know ye
that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very near Terrestrial Paradise because of the great ruggedness of the country and the innumerable wild beasts that lived in it, there were many griffins, such as were found in no other parts of the world.

  —Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, Las

  Sergas de Esplandián, 1510

  Off the coast of Terrestrial Paradise, 1602: A sailor in the rigging of a Spanish ship would have been the first to see the creatures with the huge black wings rip into the beached carcass of the whale. It’s not likely that the man in the rigging would have known what he was looking at. The captain of the ship called the Santo Tomas kept his distance from the uncharted shore. Also, it’s likely that the sailor in the rigging would have been unable to see much of anything clearly. In the early 1600s, crews on sailing ships like this one were routinely hammered by scurvy, a horrible disease that at the time had no known cure. It was not unusual to lose half a crew to the outbreak, which meant that crewmen who were not about to fall over dead would have to keep on working, ignoring the running sores, and the swollen gums, and the hallucinations.1

  Our hypothetical crewman would have been illiterate, but he would have known the plot of Las Sergas de Esplandián, the wildly adventurous epic poem written by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo. He would have known of the warrior women living on de Montalvo’s rugged island: “Amazonians” who seduced the crews of passing ships to get pregnant. Afterward, the men were killed and fed to the “innumerable wild beasts,” including the griffins with giant wings and the heads and bodies of lions. Male babies born to warrior women were left in the caves of the griffins, who ripped the babies up and fed the pieces to their young.

  Picture the confusion on the face of our half-crazed sailor as he squints toward the scene onshore. Could the stories about the flying lions be true? The wings he sees look big enough, but what’s that above the shoulders? Could it be the head of a lion?

  In the 1600s, it was plausible that scurvy-ridden Spaniards in the rigging could have had these thoughts. These men had been raised to vanquish armies led by warrior eagle gods and giant feathered snakes. Many dreamed of looting cities of gold, and some still feared that the boat they were on would sail off the edge of the Earth. In that context, griffins would have come as no surprise.

  But here’s what we know for certain: A ship called the Santo Tomas really did pass the carcass of a whale being eaten by condors in 1602; sailors, armored soldiers, and a Catholic priest went ashore to investigate the scene. Instead of Amazonians, they found hordes of grizzly bears; instead of griffins, they found condors. That much is recorded in the diaries kept by Father Antonio de la Ascension, the barefoot Carmelite friar and record keeper for the Spanish expedition.

  “Birds the shape of turkeys,” the friar wrote. “The largest I saw on this voyage.” This clipped account is the first known written reference to a California condor, and one of the few firsthand accounts of condors eating dead whales. “Here indeed is material with which to stir the most dormant imagination,” wrote condor historian Harry Harris in “The Annals of Gymnogyps to 1900.”

  Civilized man for the first time beholding the greatest Volant bird in human history, and not merely an isolated individual or two, but an immense swarm rending at their food, shuffling about in crowds for a place at the gorge, fighting and slapping with their great wings at their fellows, pushing, tugging at red meat, silently making a great commotion, and in the end stalking drunkenly to a distance with crop too heavy to carry aloft, leaving space for others in the circling throng to descend to the feast.

  Father de la Ascension was not so overwhelmed. Like the Spanish scribes who followed him, he rarely did much more than note the bare existence of the condors. I suspect that this was true in part because the word “extinction” had no meaning then, or at least not the meaning it has today. Animals that disappeared were meant to disappear, and it wasn’t necessarily permanent; if God wanted something back, all he had to do was snap his fingers.

  But the notion that the world was limitless was changing in the 1600s, thanks to a wave of commercial extinction driven by a global fur trade. In the 1500s, European royal families started wearing garments made of fur. By the time our friar saw those condors on the beach, squirrels, foxes, martens, and weasels had been all but erased from the forests of Europe and Siberia.

  By the middle of the 1700s, Russian hunters were headed for the condor’s feeding grounds. At the far edge of the ocean they paused to kill all Russian coastal fur seals. Then they moved west across the Bering Strait, looking for the rookeries. When the islands in the Bering Sea were bare, the Russians worked their way down the coast of Alaska; when those animals disappeared, the Russians trapped their way down the coast of North America, wiping out the fur seals, harp seals, harbor seals, and walrus.

  Condors had less to eat when the Russian traders moved on. Whales were still around, but the beaches weren’t thick with them. The carcasses of animals such as tule elk and pronghorn were also available, but that might not have been enough to hold the condors in the long run.

  The king of Spain stepped in and saved the species at this point. It’s likely that he’d never even heard of condors, but the birds came with the land, and he wanted the land. Rumors that the Russians were preparing forts to protect their pelt-trading interests were enough to convince Juan Carlos III to make a bold move of his own: he would string a line of forts and missions north from the tip of Baja California. Spaniards living in Mexico were ordered to go north and settle in uncharted wilds. Indians would tend to the needs of the settlers after being brought to Jesus. Those who declined would be dealt with. Those who worshipped old gods would be sent to hell.

  In 1769, the “Sacred Expedition” left the bustling tip of Baja California, bound for Alta California and the heart of the condor’s domain.

  Mounted soldiers wearing heavy leather armor rode their horses through the heat, armed with leather shields, heavy guns, heavy swords, and extremely heavy lances. Two other groups of soliders boarded warships in La Paz; the plan was to meet in San Diego and march forward en masse.

  Amazing things would happen to members of the Sacred Expedition. Horrible things would happen, too, but I’ll get to those stories later. First I want to tell you about the mangy, nervous animals that trailed behind the armored, sweating horsemen; these are the animals that saved the California condor from extinction by dominating Alta California for the next one hundred years at least.

  Alta California was God’s gift to the animals we call cows; almost everything about the place seemed tailored to their needs. The grazing lands were endless, the weather was perfect, and the relevant diseases were mild. “The growth and development of the range livestock industry in the New World was a phenomenon without precedent,” wrote the cattle expert L. T. Burcham in the book California Range Land. It was the foundation of the domestic economy of Spanish California.2

  Cows have been described as “the forward elements in the column of civilization,” but in California they were more than that. The line of missions laid out by Father Serra in the wake of this forced march to the north would not have survived for as long as it did but for these scrawny cows. And the condor would be extinct.

  These were not the kinds of animals a living soul would recognize as cows: they were not fat and square and uniformly healthy-looking and they did not live their lives in pens. They moved through landscapes never seen by Europeans, mowing down all the native grasses they could find. Most of these cows had long, skinny legs joined to narrow hips and badly swayed backs. Their heads have been described as “combatively coarse,” which probably means they were ugly.

  But if twitchiness and paranoia can be taken as a sign of animal intelligence, Spanish cows were very smart indeed. “These cattle had a quick, alert restless manner,” wrote an early student of the breed. “They have been likened to wild animals, continually sniffing the air for danger.”

  There was plenty to sniff for
. Mountain lions stalked the cows that strayed from unfenced herds, waiting for the chance to leap onto their backs and rip their throats open. Lots of other wildcats tried to do the same.

  Then there were the grizzly bears. They were better at killing cows than all the other nonhuman predators combined, and of the humans, only Spanish horsemen armed with rope knives matched the grizzly’s lethal speed and grace. Tracy Storer and Lloyd Tevis, authors of The California Grizzly, collected several written reports of grizzlies luring cattle in for the kill by lying on their backs in pastures and kicking their paws up in the air. When cows saw this playful scene, they came over to take a close look, and the grizzlies quickly knocked them dead. “The cattle will surround the bear in a wondering and gaping circle,” wrote a man who claimed to have seen such killings. “Until [the bear] who is all the while laughing in his paw at their simplicity seizes upon the first cow that comes within the grasp of his terrible claws.” Afterward, the grizzly bear walks off with his next meal, “who thus pays the expense of the performance.”3

  Teams of grizzlies may have worked together back then, with one diverting the attention of a mark away from an approaching pair of killers. One barely believable account described a steer that stopped to watch a bear roll himself up into a ball and tumble down a hill into a pasture. “Suddenly at angles from either side two other bears rushed forth,” the story goes, “and almost before one could tell what was happening the larger of the two had reached the great steer.” At that point, it was over for the unlucky bovine: “Bruin with paw as heavy as lead felled the steer to the earth.”