Condor (12 page)

“I have never seen his equal,” says Steve Herman, a staunch defender and former student of Koford's. “Biologists around today say a lot of it is hype, but let me tell you something. In the field, they wouldn't have raised a pimple on Koford's ass.”

 

November 2001: I'm sitting at the point of a rock escarpment in the middle of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in the Ventura County backcountry, taking in the prehistoric view. The map in my pocket says I'm looking at one of the lines of mountains in the Transverse Ranges. But I'm having trouble seeing the “line” part. What I see instead is a jumbled mess of hugely varied landscapes, bent and broken in a way that makes it look like something punched its way up through the crust of the earth.

Off in the distance, near the horizon, is the brown haze that
marks the outskirts of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Closer in, on a grass plateau cracked open by earthquakes, I see tilted pasturelands once grazed by Spanish cattle. Rolling hillsides end in cliffs that make it look like a colossal beast beneath the earth is trying to punch its way out. “Geologic upthrust” is the scientific term used to describe the scene in front of me. I half expect to see a giant stone fist come crashing up through one of the mountains.

I can see a knifelike fissure running roughly north and south. I'm told it's an offshoot of the “big bend” that turns the San Andreas fault line to the east beneath the Transverse. When David Brower joked that condors could only be saved by an earthquake big enough to put Los Angeles under the Pacific Ocean, it was this network of fault lines that he was counting on to do it.

But the fissure isn't what dominates the view from the spot known by biologists as “Koford's Observation Point,” or “Koford's O.P.” The dominant thing is a pockmarked curtain of yellowish cliffs that ends in a wide plateau on my side of the fissure. The cliffs fall abruptly for several hundred feet into a valley full of chaparral. Koford's escarpment rises on the other side of that valley.

I'm thinking three thoughts while I'm taking in the view. One is that it's easy to see why Koford came up here all the time. The pockmarks in those yellow cliffs are nest caves used by condors in his day. From here, with a sitting scope, he could sit and watch them all day long.

I'm also thinking about the grizzly bear head that used to hang on the wall of Lechler's grocery store in Piru, at the southern base of these mountains. I remember sitting in Lechler's store in the early 1960s and staring at that head, imagining that its giant body was sticking out of the other side of the wall. When Mr. Lechler told me that was not the case, I decided the body was still walking around in the mountains to the north, feeling around for its head.
That thought returned to me this morning when I hiked across some big black bear tracks.

I'm also thinking that you'd have to be nuts to try to move around out there. The chaparral below looks like concertina wire, and the cliffs resemble a scene from Mordor in
Lord of the Rings
. Moving back and forth would have been hell, which may be why Koford thrived there. Herman says Koford appeared to enjoy leaving students in his dust. And like all of Grinnell's disciples, he was skilled at living off the land. He drank the water he found in potholes and he often shot his meals; the speed with which he skinned small birds was on a par with the naturalists of old.

“Once when we were in the mountains of Mexico looking for the last of the Mexican grizzly bears,” Herman wrote in an e-mail,

Old-school ornithologists like to joke that you can't really understand a study species until you've eaten it, but condor steaks were not on Koford's menu, and the smaller birds were eaten rarely. Koford's old friends say he often skipped meals when he was out in the field. At times his diet seemed to consist entirely of canned
apricots. One of the biologists who followed Koford into the Sespe Condor Sanctuary says he could tell where Koford had been by looking for the empty cans.

Koford had a cabin a couple of miles to the south of his escarpment. It looked out on a pond the condors used to bathe in all the time. But the bulk of his work was done on the other side of the broad dry canyon interrupted by the curtain of pockmarked cliffs. After hacking partway through that nasty chaparral for a couple days, he'd build a blind and watch the condor caves for weeks at a time, focusing on a breeding pair with a fledgling he called Oscar. Koford saw Oscar's parents chase off ravens and golden eagles. Once he watched the chick try fruitlessly to scratch its itchy head. “Five times the left foot was brought to the head to scratch,” he wrote in his field notes. “Each time only one or two quick strokes were managed before the foot had to be hastily replaced…” Koford also watched a parent bird feed the chick by holding its open bill about an inch above the chick's head. “The chick then jams its head up into the adult's throat from below and the adult's head [starts shaking], either from regurgitation or from the wrestling actions of the chick. After a few seconds the chick pulled its head down out of the parent's throat, holding a light-colored chunk of partially digested animal remains. The chick wolfed it down and beat its wings to beg the parent bird for more. It went on this way for quite some time.”

Koford didn't think much of the gizmos sometimes used to make the lives of the note-takers easier. Other field biologists tape-recorded their observations and transcribed them later. Koford thought the practice lazy. His 32-power sighting scope and the wreck he called his car may have been his only prized technological possessions.

“Carl was frugal,” said Herman, putting it delicately. “For instance, his car had a tendency to stall…. It turned out that he had
adjusted the carburetor so that the gas/air mixture was very, very lean, i.e., as little gas as possible relative to the air. It was so lean that the motor only ran when the car was moving.”
⁵

Herman, who is in his seventies, thinks the differences between what Koford did and what field biologists do now are extremely difficult to fathom. Koford never tried to trap the birds and bolt ID tags to their wings or test their blood for man-made poisons. He never tried to follow them with tracking devices or even to find out where all the nests were. For the most part Koford sat and watched and wrote it all down, even if it didn't seem important.

“He was a generalist,” said Herman. “He's the one who built the baseline. The fact of the matter is that condors really were wild birds in Koford's day, and even my day. They are no longer, and in fact they are about as far from being truly wild as anything could get and still fly around.”

Herman wrote those words years later when the hands-off school of condor management launched by Koford's work was under attack by so-called hands-on scientists with the zoos and the federal government. He thinks abandoning the Koford approach was a terrible mistake.

 

Koford wasn't always the only human near the condor caves. Before the war, he chased off strangers armed with cameras and guns, but sometimes the strangers made it past him. Once, a magazine photographer brought a model into one of the nest caves, shooting pictures while she posed with one of the birds. Others would flush out the birds by throwing rocks at them or firing shots into the air.

Some who came to visit Koford and the birds were anything but stangers. Loye Miller made the trip in 1939 with his son Alden, who'd just taken over the job of running the Museum of Vertebrate
Zoology at U.C.-Berkeley. After peering into Oscar's cave through Koford's sighting scope, they watched a pair of condors stage what Loye Miller called a “clumsy dogfight” aloft. He also wrote of watching a group of eleven birds fly near the ridge the men were standing on, passing back and forth at eye level and striking “a variety of poses in the air.” Miller was amazed by the way the birds moved around in air that was almost completely still, twisting their tails and calibrating the giant black feathers at the ends of their wings. Later they saw the condors linger over a scoured carcass, appearing to “loaf on the wing for a time for the mere pleasure of the exercise.”

Koford spent a lot of time with J. R. Pemberton and Ed Harrison, oilmen and former egg collectors who helped fund his research grant and told him how to get to Oscar's cave. Pemberton was a physically imposing man who'd made a fortune building a railroad in Patagonia; now he was the California state official who evaluated oil-drilling proposals. Harrison was the heir to an oil fortune who didn't need to work for a living; when condor-egg hunting was outlawed in the early 1900s, he'd begun pursuing other egg collections. The two men shared an interest in the condor and the cracked terrain that was its home. There was lots of oil hidden under this terrain, and they were looking for potential drilling sites. When movie cameras first became portable, Harrison and Pemberton took one up the mountains to the high plateaus that form parts of the Sespe, where they started filming condors in their caves.

These two men were Koford's best friends in the field at the time, always bringing him groceries and the latest camera gear. On more than one occasion, the three of them filmed condors flying in and out of their nests, even though that wasn't always what the condors wanted to be doing. Pemberton sometimes encouraged the birds out by firing his pistol. Harrison and Koford filmed each
other sitting inside nest caves with a condor in their arms. I saw the films in Harrison's office in Los Angeles.
⁶

Koford quit his fellowship to go to war when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. During the war, he may have used an old birder's trick to tell Harrison where he was. On postcards that were otherwise free of any hints of his location, Koford is said to have mentioned a species of bird that could only be found near the Bering Sea, where the USS
Richmond
was stationed.

 

World War II changed California almost as much as it changed Japan. Hundreds of thousands of military families moved out to the Los Angeles area; rows of homes and freeways were unrolled in every direction. Factories and cars put much more pollution up into the air. Farmers started spraying everything they grew with an amazingly effective bug killer known as DDT, which was manufactured by the ton in a factory near the Santa Monica Bay. Ranchers, not to be outdone, started buying a new squirrel-killer called Compound 1080.

Koford returned to his study site in the mountains north of Los Angeles to find that an oil-drilling platform had been built on top of the pond the condors had once bathed in near his cabin. Access roads to other wells had been built and then widened. Mining companies were lusting after phosphate reserves, and hunters armed with army surplus rifles buzzed around like horseflies.

Koford noted the changes and went back to his birds. They seemed less common than they'd been before the war—smaller groups and fewer sightings—but there didn't seem to be a way to test that observation. After interviewing ranchers and other locals and watching the birds, he guessed that at the end of World War II, between sixty and 120 condors were left. Later, his allies only men
tioned the low end of that estimate, which was very low indeed. It meant that it would only take a small streak of bad luck to send the species into yet another downward spiral, and with all the changes going on in California, bad luck was certain. In other words, Koford wrote, people should be told that “the precarious natural balance of the population can be easily upset in the direction leading to extinction.”

Koford thought his field notes proved the need to separate the men from the birds. So did Alden Miller, Koford's adviser after the death of Joseph Grinnell. Miller was an accomplished ornithologist whose conservation strategies were rarely questioned and often accepted as gospel. In public, he was formal to the point of seeming imperious at times; behind the scenes, he was known as an enemy you did not want to make. Miller fought ferociously for the things he held dear and true.

He didn't think there was any doubt about what the condor needed. Like Koford and Grinnell, he thought the condor needed untouched wilderness and absolute isolation. Activities that might draw attention to the bird were not to be condoned. Miller felt strongly that photography was one of those activities, arguing at times that too many pictures of the birds had already been taken.

This new tactic put Koford at odds with his old friends and patrons Pemberton and Harrison. But when the war ended, Koford met Ian and Eben McMillan, who would eventually do more to promote the hands-off approach to condors than almost anyone else. Ian McMillan wrote that he was doing chores in his yard one day when Koford drove up in his broken-down jalopy and introduced himself. McMillan saw a “lean but well-built youth who turned out to be older than he looked.” Maybe it was the fine spring day or something in the way Koford moved that made McMillan think of old times: “The situation was somehow reminiscent of
former days, when Kelly Truesdale would arrive at the old homesteading McMillan canyon with intriguing reports of his collecting adventures.”

The McMillans and Koford became fast friends. The writer Dave Darlington said Eben seemed to revel in Koford's many eccentricities, including his habit of bursting into unexpected laughter and not telling anyone why. “He had a very peculiar sense of humor,” Eben told Darlington, adding he never once saw Koford in a coat, even when the ground was thick with snow.