Condor Read online

Condors tracked the movements of these bears, just as they once may have tracked the movements of dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. They would have seen what the grizzlies were up to when they rolled around playfully in the pastures, and they would have seen the traps get sprung on the unsuspecting bovines. There’s truth to the stories you hear sometimes about vultures that really do swirl over the heads of dying animals. I’ve been told that condors did it all the time. They know how to wait for the right moment.

  Actually, the surveillance may well have been mutual: California grizzlies may well have tracked the movements of the condors that were tracking them. Storer and Tevis couldn’t prove that point, but they could offer expert speculation.

  The burying of carcasses, a practice of both the grizzly and the mountain lion, may have been an effort to circumvent the big scavenger birds. Conversely, the condor may have aided the grizzly. Soaring aloft at a great height and for much of the daylight hours, one of the birds could locate a carcass. As it dropped down other birds would converge toward the site. Maybe the vulture congregations guided the bear to such a feast. When he arrived, however, the birds would flap their wings vigorously and take off to avoid being included in the bear’s repast.

  Given the level of cleverness shown by both the bears and the condors, I can’t help but wonder whether the big birds ever did more than flag the dying and the dead. Condors stay alive by anticipating sneak attacks, both on themselves and on the animals they’d eat if only they were dead. What I wonder is whether the birds enabled the bears by circling the weak and the dying like the vultures in Western movies do. And if they did these sorts of things, where did they draw the line? When a soaring condor saw a healthy cow get separated from the herd, did it ever pause or circle in ways that might have drawn the grizzlies in?

  There’s another key link between the condors and the bears: both species tended to thrive near the low, nasty forests known as the chaparral. In the summer, lightning strikes and tiny floating embers triggered instant infernos there, but when the smoke cleared, the forests always grew back thicker than they were before. Grizzly bears and condors seemed to use these forests as a defensive shield, and for a time it served them well.4

  Old-time nature writers tended to wax eloquent on the subject of chaparral: in the 1920s, these areas were sometimes referred to as nothing less than “Elfin Forests.” A writer named Francis Fultz was the one who coined that title, and he does not appear to have been joking; Fultz said he’d take chaparral trees over redwoods any day. “Dame Nature knew her business when she developed the chaparral,” he opined. “Without it the mountains would be stark pinnacles and naked ridges, the foothills barren, the rocky slopes and the valleys nothing but beds of cobblestones and gravel.” Fultz was among the first to see how varied these forests were, claiming that his “elfin woods” contained a wider range of plants and trees than any other forest in the country.

  There’s no doubt that Fultz is right about all this: chaparral forests are diverse and they can be magical. If you look around you’ll find tiny twisted oak trees and tiny twisted pines, mixed together so tightly that you can’t see through them. The smell of mint is everywhere, and in the spring the wildflowers are amazing. You want to crawl around in there until you find the dancing elves.

  But when you do, your skin is ripped by knifelike thorns or covered with painful red rashes. Your machete bouces backward off a springy branch and hits you right between the eyes. You creep through a maze of tunnels underneath the chaparral that appears to have sealed it off. Hours later, after crawling through a drainpipe-size opening into the blessed sunlight, you pull your face up out of the dirt when you hear the sound of an approaching bear. Or maybe it’s a coyote, or a mountain lion. All you know for sure is that it’s big and you don’t want to know what it is, so you dive back into the elfin forest, looking for another way out. You trip and plant your face in a hornet’s nest or another thorny bush. On the way out, bleeding and screaming, you fail to see the rattlesnake in your path.

  Grizzlies used the chaparral forests as a fortified base of operations. Twisting tunnels covered by canopies of the ten-foot trees connected the dens to the pasturelands and to other dens. Sleeping quarters might have multiple entrances. Some tunnels stopped abruptly. Families of bears used these pathways over and over, to the point that in a few locations, generations of grizzly bears literally walked in the footsteps of their predecessors, creating a succession of paw pits that were sometimes eight to ten inches deep and fourteen to sixteen inches apart. When the grizzlies were destroyed by hunters and ranchers spreading all manner of poisons, black bears moved in to further deepen the age-old ruts. I only know of two people who crawled around in the chaparral tunnels because they liked doing it. One is the late Joseph P. Grinnell, the legendary western ecologist who founded the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. The other is a recluse/artist named Jon Schmitt, who used to explore the tunnels when he was observing condor nests as a volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Schmitt is exactly the kind of person you’d expect to be living in there—not too tall, big black beard, extremely soft-spoken, a taxidermist and line artist who draws the birds he sees in the wild. Born at least one hundred years too late, he says, and his friends all agree with the assessment.

  Schmitt crawled through the chaparral for days at a time in the 1980s. He never met a bear or a mountain lion, but he did learn to recognize the sound angry hornets make when a bear eats half of their nest. He says he often thought of grizzly bears while crawling in the ruts they’d created—how it must have felt to be so big and move so gracefully, melting in and out of the tiniest gaps in endless walls of brush. Schmitt’s reveries sometimes got him lost, he once told me, and being lost in the chaparral has certain rewards. Exiting tunnels surrounded by the densest brush, Schmitt emerged into meadows never mowed down by cattle or even lightly grazed by deer, let alone visited by hikers. The lowest branches on full-size oak trees would rise just a few inches off the ground.

  They were little time warps, Schmitt says, recalling one bit of chaparral landscape so beautiful that he didn’t even want to walk around. “An untouched meadow of native bunch grasses, tightly hemmed and guarded by the densest of chaparral brush,” he said. “I’ve occasionally seen some nice and even extensive beds of bunch grasses in condor country, but they were tiny fragments compared to what I was looking at.”

  He followed a black bear trail to the middle of the untouched meadow, wondering whether it had once been used by Indians, grizzlies, dire wolves, and saber-toothed cats. “I feel my sense of wonder building,” he said. “I closed my eyes and spread this meadow out across the alien foothills of the entire eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley, and then across the whole of the L.A. Basin.”

  He thinks of this imaginary landscape when he sees the condors soaring. After all, they were there. They saw the grass get eaten by the cattle and replaced by the weeds, or recolonized and covered up by more chaparral.

  Before the arrival of the cattle herds, hundreds of thousands of native Californians subsisted on a diet of nuts, berries, roots, leaves, fish, and not much meat. They killed game from time to time, but did not tend to count on it: those meals were for special occasions.

  The men who ran the missions threw those nuts and berries into the trash, forcing the Indians to eat what they gave them. Indians who did want to eat from these piles were told to change their minds—it was a real “Let them eat steak” atmosphere. Some natives adapted readily to this new diet. One friar wrote that at the mission he ran, it wasn’t long before the “average” Indian was asking for ten pounds of beef a day, and some were asking for more. The friar did not say what the Indians were doing with these wagonloads of meat and fat, but the implication was that they were eating it until they couldn’t eat any more.

  Richard Henry Dana, the wayward New Englander who wrote Two Years Before the Mast, said that mealtime wasn’t any different in the galleys of ships in
the harbors. “During all this time we lived upon nothing but fresh beef,” Dana wrote. “Beefsteaks three times a day, morning, noon and night cut thick and fried in fat with the grease poured over [the top]. Round this we sat attacking it with our jackknives and teeth.”

  New England was the mecca for shoemakers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and for most of that time, the demand for the hides from California cattle was as bottomless as the supply. Cobblers and middlemen in the docks in New England bought every hide the sailing ships could carry, and the ships found ways to carry tens of thousands at a time. The vessel on which Dana crewed packed forty thousand dried and flattened hides into its hold, and other ships may have carried twice that. From 1822 to 1846, more than a million cowhides reached Boston every year, along with tons of candle tallow made from boiling cow fat. Naturally, the natives were awarded that job.

  But a few got lucky. They were allowed to ride with the legendary Spanish horsemen called vaqueros, who worked endlessly to bring the jittery herds to slaughter. Some of the herds stretched more than a mile across, and the horsemen had earned their reputation. Awestruck bystanders watched them ride like demons, twirling lassos with extreme dexterity and skill. Errant cows were almost always brought down with a single arcing throw of the rope.

  Sometimes the vaqueros showboated at rodeos, roping and killing all sorts of animals, including California condors. Usually they threw their lassos around the necks of the birds, which doesn’t sound especially sporting. Presumably these condors had been rendered incapable of flight before the event. Presumably the throats of the birds were slit when the performances were over.

  Soaring condors would have stayed close to the horsemen working on the unfenced ranchos. Vaqueros sometimes killed and skinned cows on the spot to get their hands on an attractive hide. And when the great clouds of dust started rising, it meant the herds were being driven to the rodeo grounds for what was known as the matanza, which in English simply means “the slaughter.” Fifty to one hundred of the fattest cows would be killed and cut into pieces, with the meat going to the missions, the fat to the tallow pots over the fires, and the hides to the beaches to be stretched, dried, sorted by color, and inspected for impurities.

  What a wretched mess the matanzas must have left behind them. Near the missions, carcasses without their hides piled up near the “killing trees” the cattle were tied to and then slaughtered; when those piles got too big, the natives had to drag them off and throw them in ravines. Indians who smelled like they’d gone swimming in cow fat tended the tallow fires, slowly stirring the boiling, smoking messes in the vats. Bears and vultures living on the moon would have been attracted by the stench; condors, lacking a sense of smell, would have followed them down. There were reports of grizzlies that swam across rivers and climbed the walls of the missions to get in on the fun. Some walked straight through the centers of towns to get to the killing fields. The condors would have circled down soon afterward, seen the dust and smoke, and gotten there first. They would have gathered by the hundreds in the trees, waiting for the chance to scour the bones.

  Through all of this, for many years, the herds kept growing. By the late 1840s, it was often useful to chase down any stray cattle. There were reports of feral herds that grazed between the boundaries of various missions, or in the great swampy valley to the east of the coastal mountains. Spaniards tended to avoid that part of Alta California: when the hostile Indian tribes weren’t after you, malarial mosquitoes were.

  The cattle era peaked in the 1860s, having outlived the mission system, the Spanish and Mexican governments, many millions of Indians, and most of the California grizzly bears. The decline that followed isn’t over yet—there are still some cattle out there—but the end draws closer every day.

  The Sacred Expedition sent north to map out missions and save the souls of Indians was in trouble by the time it reached San Diego Bay. Many of the soldiers on the ship that sailed up from La Paz had contracted scurvy; they would have collapsed under the weight of the leather armor and the heavy weapons. Those that did continue were described as looking “skeletal” by a friar who rode with them. Juan Gaspar de Portolá, a military man, led the ghastly horsemen north again, hoping to end up in Monterey.

  The Sacred Expedition rode through what the archivist Harry Harris wrote was “utterly unknown and unexplored territory, every mile of it condor country.” At one point they camped in an alluvial plain full of willow trees and Indians of “good character.” Father Pedro Fages seemed especially stricken by the beauty of the future L.A. Basin, but then a series of earthquakes hit and the expedition rode on.

  Later, on some hills near what is now the town of Watsonville, they came upon a burnt-out village that had apparently just been abandoned. The natives who had lived there apparently torched their homes before departing, for reasons unrevealed to the Spaniards riding through the smoky mess. The only thing that hadn’t been burned was the carcass of a young California condor. Father Juan Crespi wrote that the carcass had been mounted on a pole in the center of the ruined village. The condor had been skinned and “stuffed with grass,” continued Father Crespi. “It appeared to be a royal eagle” left behind to send a message. In “The Annals of Gymnogyps to 1900,” Harris guessed that the bird was being “raised and fattened for…the most important festival on the calendar”: the ritual sacrifice of the immortal bird-god Chininginich. “Prematurely doing away with this demigod under the circumstances recounted indicates some connection with their hope of personal safety,” Harris wrote. “And their belief in the [ability] of Gymnogyps to prevail over the death of his friends.”

  Perhaps the natives thought the bird-god would protect them from mounted, armored soldiers—men who would eventually attempt to force them to accept the Christian God. Thoughts such as those would soon become offenses punished by death. But this time, apparently, the bird-god held, and the Indians were never found.

  five

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  Pistols and rifles rang out everywhere. Everyone took aim without troubling to ascertain where his bullet might stop.

  —Vincente Perez Rosales, forty-niner

  The biggest mistake the condor ever made was not evolving bulletproof vests.

  —Lloyd Kiff

  The California gold rush hit the condor’s world like a meteor from the East. When it did, the mountains crumbled and the rivers died; afterward, squalid human settlements festered like diseases. While the rush was on, a writer went to see the forests near the town of Placerville, returning to report that nothing remained but hillsides covered with stumps. The local river was also gone, said the same man: the water that had once rolled past the town had now been channeled into a mess of hoses that slithered toward the mining sites.1

  Condors weren’t common in the flatlands to the west of the Sierra Nevada—the place where the flow of the rivers slowed and allowed the gold to settle—but this was a catastrophe in which the side effects were worse than the event itself. When the forests near the mines were gone, for instance, the loggers moved up the western side of the Sierra Nevada with the force of an after-blast. Some of the world’s Gothic-looking forests were lost in the process. These are the forests John Muir described as “the clearest path into the universe,” places so beautiful they’d become a “synonym for God.”2

  Condors roosted in some of those trees, scanning the horizons and waiting for the wind. Thanks to Muir, there’s no need to wonder how it felt when the winds hit. He once climbed a hundred-foot Douglas spruce in the middle of a powerful storm. Holding tight to the branches at the top of this tree, Muir felt as if he’d stepped into a flood.

  “Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples and sweeps over the bending pines from hill to hill. Nearer we see…leaves now speeding by on level currents, now whirling in eddies, and now escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring aloft on grand upswelling domes of air. Smooth deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies, sing around every tree and leaf.” Co
ndors read the winds Muir did, except that they had better eyes. They would have left the area before a storm like this one could get close, knowing that its winds are not the ones they like to use. But, if by some strange reason they had chosen to stay, they would have known how to skirt the eddies and find the grand upswellings. How they did it—what they saw in the wind—is almost as much a mystery today as it was when Muir was up that tree.3

  Condors may also have nested in the trees in these grand forests, raising chicks and watching over fledglings. Whether there were more than a few of them is a matter of speculation, but if towering trees with rotted-out cavities near the top were what was needed, the condors would have had a lot of choices. Condors also needed trees with big dead branches near the top for perching and looking around. These would be the branches struck by lightning or singed by fires that burned in the canopies. Muir once wrote of watching fires burn like that, “flaming across the green branches at a height of perhaps 200 feet, entirely cut off from the ground fires, looking like signal beacons.” He saw dozens of these canopy fires burning in a forest at once, with those in the distance glowing like “great stars above the forest roof.”4

  What the condors wanted were the trees that were like condors: gnarled giants with bald, scarred heads and sweeping views of the world. After the gold rush, these were the trees whose stumps were sometimes used as dance floors; trees that had to be felled and then blown up with dynamite before the bits would fit into the sawmills.

  The market for the wood of these giant trees was minuscule in 1848. Then three hundred thousand people rushed into the region, changing everything forever. When the first flecks of gold were found at Sutter’s mill, the human population of California consisted of ten thousand Mexicans, an unknown number of Indians, and hardly anybody else. Five years later, “anybody else” outnumbered Mexicans ten to one and Indians by a margin no one counted, and plans were being laid to build a railroad line that would bring more Yankees west.