Condor Read online

  Townsend had been planning to write a series of his own books about the birds of the United States, with lavish illustrations to be provided by various French artists. But he couldn’t compete with Audubon’s masterwork. Townsend only published the first book in his planned series before he went broke and junked the project. Townsend’s brilliant future began to fade, and he had begun to lose his health. In 1851, after years of sickness, he died. The cause of death by most accounts was arsenic poisoning.

  Bird collectors hired by museums hunted California’s condors on an intermittent basis for most of the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries. What they did more often was complain about how hard it was to find a condor to shoot. Some of these hunters thought the birds were shy and inclined to stay away from people, while others talked about the near-impenetrability of the mountains the condors lived in.

  Fears for the future of the species were expressed on a regular basis. Just as regularly, sport hunters or ranchers got the blame. Overzealous private collectors were occasionally added to this list of suspects, along with the “oologists” who bought and sold the condors’ eggs.

  The only group the scientists did not blame was their own. Suggestions to the contrary were met with indignation at first, and then with explanations of the many things the scientists learned from bird skins. These explanations were crystallized in a 1915 essay written by Joseph P. Grinnell, one of the most important and accomplished natural scientists in his day. “It is with considerable apprehension that I have observed an unmistakable decrease in the number of collectors,” he wrote. “Matters of precision and accuracy are no doubt suffering as a consequence of this forsaking of the ‘shotgun method.’” In Grinnell’s opinion, this change was not only a threat to the future of ornithology but a possible threat to the entire scientific method:

  The training involved in bird collecting can surely be given some credit in several cases of eminent men of science who are now valuable contributors to science in other fields. The making of natural history collections is useful as a developmental factor, even if dropped after a few of the earlier years in a man’s career. Collecting develops scientific capacity; it combines outdoor physical exercise with an appropriate proportion of mental effort…The ultimate fate of practically all private collections is the college or the museum. Very few bird skins, for instance, are destroyed except through fire or other catastrophe. They live on and on.5

  Grinnell did not want to see the budding science of ecology turned into a hobby pursued by “dilettantes,” “amateurs,” and “extreme sentimentalists.” Bird protectionists were to be thanked for responding to turn-of-the-century warnings of the damage being done by the market hunters and ladies wearing big feathered hats, but now Grinnell thought the activists went too far when they tried to plug the scientists’ guns. Eastern states were then considering plans to ban all forms of bird collecting, lest more species go the way of the extinct passenger pigeon. Grinnell agreed that for the rarest birds, the collectors should be forced to make exceptions: “Limitations may be properly imposed…by excepting species like the Ivory-billed woodpecker or the Carolina parakeet.”

  Every time I read those words I wonder why Grinnell didn’t put the condor on his short list of critically endangered bird species, given the widespread hunch that the condor was already over the edge. Grinnell was never shy about speaking his mind, and he had special interest in the condor: in his teens he spent countless hours watching an active nest site he’d discovered near the town of Pasadena. “It’s an out-of-the-way corner of the mountains, so I think they are safe,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in May 1905. “I and my boys who know of this have agreed to leave these birds strictly alone; so that unless some fool gunner gets a shot at them they will doubtless nest in the same place next year.”

  Grinnell was a scientific prodigy, famous for his fieldwork and his skin collection by the time he was old enough to drink. Stories have been told about the time he memorized a thick book of scientific terms, and of how he once looked out of the moving buggy he was in and announced that local kangaroo rats had begun their breeding season, even though there wasn’t a single kangaroo rat to be seen. (“He could see the impact of their scrotal sacs in the sand,” wrote his close friend Alden Miller, the son of the field biologist Loye Miller. “He was soon proved right by the yield of the traplines.”) Grinnell grew up to be the editor of a leading ornithological journal, the director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley, the creator of a famously precise set of rules for scientific note-taking in the field, and the author of landmark studies of everything from grizzly bears to ecological niche theories. For most of his career he was the grand pooh-bah of natural-history studies west of the Missouri.

  Yet despite his early interest in the condor, he was quiet on the subject. One explanation is that early on, Grinnell didn’t think the birds were as close to extinction as the failed collectors kept saying; he knew ranchers who said they still saw condors by the dozens.

  But here’s a theory I like better than that: I think Grinnell worked hard to keep the condors out of the limelight, as a way of keeping them away from people.

  Grinnell was among the first to see the condor as a creature of the wilderness and not as an outlaw bird that flew off with live prey. Unfortunately, there were lots of humans who wanted to get close to the bird, in order to admire it or shoot it or steal its eggs or simply chase it around. I think Grinnell tried to solve this problem in the simplest possible way: if people forgot the bird was around, they wouldn’t go looking for it.

  This approach was a gamble for an obvious reason: until the end of the 1930s, no one had ever spent more than a few days at a time watching condors lead their lives. No one had ever tried to count the number of condors left in the world, or to systematically study the impact of the skin collectors on the condor. Grinnell helped solve that problem when he sent a graduate student up into the Santa Susana Mountains to do just that in 1939. But before we get to that, we need to take a closer look at the damage done by two groups of condor killers.

  The first group didn’t really kill the birds. Instead, they kept them as pets. References to condors kept on leashes in people’s front yards started turning up before the gold rush, and they did not stop turning up until almost a century later. In 1846, a man named William Gamble wrote that he had long been impressed by “the great disposition of the Vulture to become domesticated.” Gamble said he knew of an Andean condor that roamed the streets of a Peruvian city for years:

  It would follow and walk alongside a person like a dog for a considerable distance and offer no resistance to being handled or having its feathers smoothed down. It would ascend a long hill leading to the part of the city where the foreigners resided, and when tired of the place or after having procured all it could obtain to eat, it would spread its large wings and soar down to the city, alighting perhaps on a steeple or some other lofty point…I think I have never met with any bird which exhibited more tameness or more confidence in man than this large and remarkable condor.

  California’s condor owners said their birds could do all that and more. One sad owner wrote that his pet condor was jumping in and out of a child’s wagon when it slipped and broke its leg, forcing the owner to shoot it. A condor tied to a leash tied to something else was killed by a dog. A bird that was supposed to be kept as a pet died when it was fatally injured by a lasso. Condors kept as pets and then returned to the wild would have had a hard time surviving. No one’s ever tried to add it all up, but we do know the pet-taking habit extended well into the twentieth century, when the world’s most famous condor pet came into the picture. That was a bird the photographer and naturalist William Finley took from the secret nest near Pasadena, after being led there by his friend and colleague Grinnell. The condor, known as “the General,” was supposed to be the subject of an elaborate photographic documentary, beginning on the day the General hatched from his egg. To take these
pictures, Finley dragged an old-fashioned camera up and down the mountain many times. One day, when a parent condor seemed to shun the chick, Finley picked it up and took it home with him to Oregon, where he locked the condor into a long, narrow wire-mesh cage built around the stump of an apple tree. The General was allowed to roam the yard for a time each afternoon; when Finley was late with meals the bird climbed up the side of the enclosure, sticking his beak through the openings and looking around for his master.6

  Finley wrote a series of articles about the General for national magazines. In all of them the bird was described as being “gentler” than any cat or dog. “Why should such a creature be revolting?” he asked. “He was not ugly to me. Behind his rough exterior and his appearance of savageness, this young condor showed a nature that was full of love and gentleness.” Finley wrote that the General was shy in the presence of men and unusually fearful of “strange women, which we thought was due to their manner of dress.”

  Finley’s bird was a new and different version of the condor: one that was competing with the family dog for the title of man’s best friend. You wouldn’t want to leave this bird in charge of the kids, but you wouldn’t ever think of killing it, especially when it was playfully sticking its beak up your pant legs. “One might think a person could have little attachment for a vulture,” Finley wrote. “[But] there is nothing strange or treacherous in the condor nature. General undoubtedly felt a strong love for society. He liked to be petted and amused. He preferred to be near me rather than alone. His intelligence was surprising at times.”

  Finley, like his close friend Grinnell, thought the condor’s fate was inextricably linked to the fate of the condor’s wild homelands, which turned his efforts to humanize condors into a double-edged sword. When Finley wrote the first of his many odes to the bird he called the General, he honored a fad that pulled condors off the very land he wanted to preserve. None of these birds would ever breed or lay a fertile egg again. Many were killed when their owners got bored or tired of seeing carcasses in the yard. Some were left to be released when they got too big, even though these birds would by then have been behaviorally crippled. Finley sent the General to the Bronx Zoo when he reached adulthood. For a time he was said to be an extremely popular attraction. Then one day the General choked to death on a rubber band that had found its way into the condor cage. Maybe somebody shot it at the bird, thinking it would be funny.

  Finley reacted, at least in print, as if he’d lost a son, writing a florid eulogy to the bird whose “wrinkled pate and flabby jowls, with the toothless expression of a toothless old woman, led the imagination back to some mysterious creature of the prehistoric past.” Apparently, he didn’t regret the decision to make this bird his pet and saw no link between the work of bird collectors, like him, and the desperate straits the wild condor now appeared to be in.

  Sanford R. Wilbur, an archivist and biologist who worked with California condors in the 1970s, once tried to find the skins of every condor killed in the name of science. Wilbur says he started out by sifting through the records kept by first-rate collectors such as the late Joseph Grinnell. References he found in those records led him to a lot of libraries, where he sifted through more records and read lots of microfiche. References to kills turned up in hundred-year-old journals and obscure scientific publications. After weeding out some of the tallest tales, he started looking for cross-references. When he was done, he had a documented record of three hundred condors known to have died between 1782 and 1976, and a list of forty different condor eggs taken from their nests by collectors. Eighteen of the deaths were the result of natural causes such as disease. Another thirty-five had no known cause at all, which means collectors might have been involved. The remaining 247 condor deaths were the direct result of human intervention, including forty-one malicious shootings, 177 shootings by museum collectors, three deliberate poisonings, and twenty-six other human-caused deaths.

  Finally Wilbur went to see most of these condor eggs and skins. He ended up in the basements and back rooms of homes and museums, pulling open drawers that didn’t look like they’d been opened for decades. “Many of the skins I saw were pretty ratty-looking,” he said. Specimens of condors on display at the museums were sometimes painted to obscure their age.

  Wilbur says he also found a total of seventy hollowed-out condor eggs, including one that turned up in the trash behind a museum. Wilbur thinks the skin collectors helped bring the condor down by doing most of their collecting all at once, at the turn of the last century. The skin collectors themselves would have bristled at this claim, he says. They would have blamed the people who took the condors’ eggs.

  seven

  EGGMEN

  I have a picture of an egg collector on my desk—a black-and-white shot of a grizzled old farmhand known as Kelly Truesdale. He’s sitting in the corner of a dim shack in an unknown location, wearing a dirty work shirt and pair of dirty jeans. His stone-faced expression reminds me of Buster Keaton. He knows what the joke is, but he’ll never admit it.1

  A flat wooden tray full of birds’ eggs rests in Kelly Truesdale’s lap. Trays just like it are stacked up in a cabinet behind him. I don’t see the condor eggs Truesdale was so good at finding, but that’s not surprising: Truesdale would have sold them to the highest bidder before they were even laid.2

  This picture was taken in the 1950s, when Truesdale was a bent old codger and egg collecting was a badly tarnished occupation. But it was not always thus. From the end of the Civil War to the start of World War II, egg collecting was a mass obsession in the United States, a hobby in the sense that heroin is an analgesic. In A World of Watchers: An Informal History of the American Passion for Birds, the historian Joseph Kastner called this craze a side effect of the rise of the leisure class and of the American magazine, but collectors always said the egg came first. They wrote of farm boys “seduced from the furrow” by Mother Nature’s “painted oval souvenirs,” and of grown collectors with a language all their own:

  The shapes are defined as generally elliptical, long elliptical, short elliptical, sub elliptical, long and short elliptical, spherical, oval, short oval, long oval, pyroform (one end pointed, the other broad), long pyroform and short pyroform…. The patterns on the shell surfaces are described as wreathed, capped, overlaid, scribbled, scrawled, speckled, streaked, marbled, spotted, dotted, splotched, splashed. The infinite gradations of color [include] tawny olive, greenish glaucous, aniline lilac, Quaker drab…odd facts the other birders miss.

  The giant pale bluish-green egg of the condor was the ne plus ultra of the collector’s world. Men whose collections numbered in the tens of thousands dreamed of laying their hands on one, and most were ready to pay top dollar. Egg collectors living in the condor’s rangelands learned to cover their tracks and keep their mouths shut. It was always wise to act as if competitors were lining up to stab you in the back.

  Those things happened from time to time: condor-egg collecting was a discipline that had a shady side. A hometown friend of Truesdale’s, who understood why he chased the condors’ eggs, once wrote about how some of Truesdale’s competitors appeared to swim in the “intrigue that seems to characterize oological activities.” In his book Man and the California Condor, a local rancher named Ian McMillan said Truesdale learned that the hard way, when he agreed to take a friend to a cave that had an egg inside it. When the men arrived, they decided to take some pictures of the scene, but they hadn’t thought to bring a camera. Truesdale knew there was a camera store in the town of Paso Robles, which he could reach in two days. Leaving his friend to guard the camp and the egg, Truesdale hiked down out of the mountains and caught a passing stagecoach. Five days later, back at the camp, Truesdale discovered that his friend had packed his things and left, taking with him the cotton-filled coffee can in which Truesdale stored his eggs. Climbing to the nest, he saw scattered wisps of cotton and not much else: the egg he’d he planned to steal from the birds had been stolen by his (former) friend. “With
no one in sight he shouted,” wrote McMillan. “But there was only silence from the surrounding chaparral.”

  Truesdale met his share of rotten luck, said McMillan, who wrote that the collector once flushed an adult condor from a cave before seeing that the egg was sitting on the bird’s stubby feet. When the condor jumped, the egg flew forward past the man, exiting the cave and rolling off the edge of a cliff.

  Scenes such as those were very rare and very hard to verify, according to the archivists and ornithologists who dig around in egg collectors’ records. One of the reasons is that it’s all but impossible to find a condor’s cave, let alone one with an egg inside. Once, while I was in Arizona, a biologist pointed toward what she said was an active condor nest—a cave in the middle of a wall of red rock. After staring at the spot for five or ten minutes, I decided she was joking. But just as I was giving up, an adult condor slid out of a crack onto a narrow ledge, like paper coming out of a printer. When it slid back in, I still had trouble seeing where the bird had come from.

  Even if you were to spy a pair of condors sitting on a ledge with a sign that said THE EGG IS OVER HERE, getting to the egg was a job best left to locals with a death wish. These caves were impossible to reach, and the birds were good at making sure they weren’t followed. “No one ever found a condor egg on purpose,” said Lloyd Kiff of the Peregrine Fund. “You had to be good and then had to get lucky.”