Condor (25 page)

Condor number 82 was the next to go: a biologist found it on the ground a little farther from the Vermilion Cliffs. “Face down, wings open,” Farry wrote. “The carcass was in extremely poor condition, indicating that she had been at this location for some time.” Farry's hunch was that the bird was trying to return to the Vermilion Cliffs when its wings gave out. After the bird hit the ground and died, coyotes tore it to bits.

Traps for the remaining condors had been set by then—big mesh boxes over the carcasses, with an open door at one end. When six or seven condors had walked through the door, a field biologist would snap it by pulling on a hidden line.

At first the condors kept their distance, which came as no surprise. “They'd all done the same thing before and ended up in kennels.” These were remarkably wily birds, but Farry was too rushed to be impressed; for all he knew, every condor in the area had lead pellets melting in its guts.

“I'd sit there in the blind and watch them land on top of the trap, and then walk around it, and then jump back on top, and I'm thinking,
Please go inside, please, please, please.
But they don't.”

Another bird was AWOL by this time: condor number 150 had disappeared after flying into Marble Canyon. A very weak set of beeps seemed to be coming from a section of the Colorado River called the Sheer Wall Rapids.

“Attempts to triangulate the signal by circling around to the eastern rim [from the western rim] failed,” Farry wrote. Climbing several thousand feet up to the top of a place called Echo Cliffs didn't help—Farry couldn't find the signal up there, either. The Hatch Company lent a hand by allowing him to stick telemetry devices to one of their planes, but this attempt also came up empty. “The signal remained stationary, extremely weak, and defied pinpointing,”
Farry wrote in his notes. Condor 150 was the first condor ever hatched at the Peregrine Fund and was never found.

Farry and the crew lured the remaining eleven condors into the walk-in trap with a carcass inside it. The newly captured birds were locked in kennels and driven to the trailer at Vermilion Cliffs. Inside, Farry and his colleagues pulled the birds out of the kennels and held them down on a table. Blood was drawn and run through a brand-new high-speed lead-testing machine. Three minutes later, a rough lead count flashed on a screen, sometimes next to the word “high.” Birds with high counts were loaded back into their kennels and driven over to the veterinary clinic in Page. If X-rays there showed pellets, the condors were loaded up again and hauled to the Phoenix Zoo.

The pressure was overwhelming. “I'd be standing there with five or six kennels with condors inside them lined up on the kitchen floor,” Farry recalled. “We'd take a bird out of the kennel and draw some blood and spend the next three minutes totally freaked out. Then the machine beeps and the guy next to me just says ‘high.' When he says it for the fifth time in a row, you know it's going to be a long night.”

Some of the birds in the kennels were barely breathing; others were bouncing around and screeching like they'd been stabbed. One of the first lead readings seemed impossible—condor 158, a five-year-old male, had the highest lead count ever recorded in a California condor. “Three hundred ninety,” Farry said. “This bird should have been dead. A count in the mid–three hundreds was supposed to be lethal. If anybody ever needed proof that these birds were resilient, this was it.”

Condor 158 had six lead shotgun pellets in her gizzard. Condor 133 had one in her intestine. Condor 136 had two in the gut; condor 119 had one.

These birds were driven to Phoenix to have the pellets removed. Other birds were forced to endure an extremely painful cleansing process called chelation therapy. One or two people would hold a bird while Farry injected a chemical called calcium EDTA into its chest muscles. Each bird needed two injections a day for at least five days. The shots were extremely painful, even when the calcium EDTA was mixed with painkillers.

Farry said he thought about how much the birds were going to hate the sight of his face for the rest of their lives. “We'd been trying to teach the birds to stay away from people, and one of the ways you do that is to make the birds associate humans with pain. It didn't seem like they were going to have problems making that association after this was over with.”

The first round of chelation shots did what it was supposed to do—lead levels in all of the birds started to fall. A second round of shots pulled the levels down even further. Except for 191—the second bird to die—all nine of the captured condors were now out of danger. By putting the birds and the field crew through several weeks of hell, Farry had saved the reputation of the Peregrine Fund. If all or most of the captured birds had died, it's likely the Arizona reintroduction program would have died with it.

But what was he supposed to do now? Rerelease the condors back into the environment that had just poisoned them? Send them to the zoos and wait for a new set of birds? Farry and his colleagues tried to think the issue through. The first problem was that they didn't know where the lead in the birds had come from, and there were a lot of possibilities.

So what were the clues? According to Farry, one was that these condors liked company. They followed each other around and ate from the same carcasses, like the one he'd seen them eating from just before the crisis developed. Another clue was that the birds all
got sick at once. Farry thought the clues pointed toward a “massive freak event,” which was not likely to recur. All he had to do was find a giant, half-eaten, lead-filled carcass in the vicinity and the case would have been closed.
³

But he didn't find it, and there was another clue that didn't seem to fit this explanation. Lead pellets pulled from the birds were of different sizes, which meant they were almost certainly fired out of several shotguns. This raised several possibilities, two of which would have been alarming. If the condors got the lead poisoning by eating carcasses in several different locations, it would mean that no gunshot carcass was safe for the birds and it would be time to send them back to the zoos. The other scary thought was that a group that didn't like the condors had prepared a booby trap, filling one carcass with bullets. Farry thought it far more likely that some small-time rabbit hunters did it by mistake, by stacking up several dozen rabbit carcasses and posing for a picture. Or maybe it was a bunch of drunk teenagers opening up on a dead horse. In the absence of the carcass, there was cover for all kinds of theories.

Farry decided to write the episode off as a well-meaning mistake. “Maybe someone who loved condors thought he would make sure they had enough to eat, and so he shot a bunch of animals and laid them out where he thought the birds would find them.”

Farry released the birds in the fall. Over the years, this process had become routine. But not this time. This time Farry was worried that he might be making a terrible mistake. That's what he says he was thinking about as he prepared the birds to be released. First he tested new radio transmitters on the wings of the birds, attaching them with “cable ties, nuts and bolts, dental floss and super glue.” Then he weighed the birds, checked their vital signs, and double-checked the transmitters.

“Then the condor is carried toward the cliff edge and gently re
leased on the ground,” he wrote in his notes. “Typically the condor takes a few seconds to regain its composure before it takes to the air, catching the strong uplifting winds generated by the sheer sandstone walls.” Farry and his colleagues had seen that happen so often they sometimes took it for granted, but this was not one of those times. “On October 26, 2000, releasing condors back into the wilds very different,” he wrote. “To say we were a bit apprehensive is an understatement.”

M
ike Wallace started thinking about hang gliding in the early 1980s, when he was working with Andean condors in Peru. When he saw California condors shadowing gliders near the Sespe in the 1990s, he knew he had to get up there. “I wasn't
that
old,” Wallace said. “Anyway I talked about it and talked about it until my girlfriend cut a hang glider ad out of the paper and slapped it down on the table in front of me. ‘Okay, Mike, no more excuses.'”

We talked while driving north along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains on a ten-lane interstate freeway. I sat next to Wallace with a tape recorder and a notebook in my lap. The back of the pickup we were riding in held all of the essential field supplies—doughnuts and candy bars, a framed picture of Carl Koford, a backpack full of camping stuff, a garbage bag with dirty laundry inside it, one running shoe, and a silver briefcase containing a digital camera with a giant telephoto lens.

We were going to a condor party on the old Hopper Ranch, now the Hopper Mountain Refuge. Wallace was to be there as a repre
sentative of the captive breeding program at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and as the chairman of a panel that's supposed to advise the condor recovery program. I'd come out to talk to him at the wild animal park, and then at his home in a rural corner of San Diego County. The house he lived in with his wife and daughter was surrounded by an avocado orchard, and Wallace had dabbled in the sales end of that business for a while. But Wallace didn't need such cutthroat competition, and it wasn't long before he gave up trying to make a profit.

“Here's the thing about hang gliding,” he said while pulling out to pass a gargantuan truck. “Every time I do it I am overwhelmed by the condors' flying skills. They can see a black patch of ground a mile away and instantly know the exact size and shape of the thermal wind rising out of it. As a nonflapping entity, I am always trying to calculate these things, and it always amazes me to think that the birds do it naturally.”

“Nonflapping entity?” I asked.

“Airplane, helicopter, rocket ship, blimp—pretty much everything that flies that's not a bird or a bat.”

The Foothill Freeway merged with the westbound Simi Valley Freeway, which rose and banked to the west. Elevated interstates are no longer built in California—they fall down in earthquakes—and in a way that's sad. I like the way they force people to look out on the worlds they are missing as they drive back and forth from work.

“Look at that line of thermal heads,” Wallace said, pointing at a line of clouds that made me think of bouffant hairdos. “Underneath each of those clouds is a powerful column of rising air. When they line up like that, it's called a cloud street. Soaring birds and really good hang glider pilots use clouds like those as stepping-stones.”

“What if you're a bad hang glider pilot?”

“Then you get sucked up into the cloud or stranded out in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. You land in a parking lot if you're lucky. If you're not, you crash into a building.”

The sign for the Golden State Freeway exit said 2.5 miles. Has Wallace ever flown with the condors? “No,” he said, wistfully. “I can't do that. I'm the guy who ends up on the ground with the radio, telling other pilots not to get too close. That doesn't help if the condors
want
to get close, which happens frequently. But no, I don't think I'm ever going to live the dream of looking over and seeing a condor arcing across the sky right next to me. I've done that with seagulls, red-tailed hawks, golden eagles. But not condors.”

We leaned into the off-ramp to the Golden State (better known as the I-5) north and swirled through a corkscrew 275-degree turn. After flying forward for a couple of minutes, we swirled in the opposite direction, landing on the westbound side of State Highway 126. The road my family knew as Blood Alley was now a four-lane thruway to the ocean, and not the hair-raising thrill ride down the north side of the Santa Clara River. South of the river were the familiar lines of orange trees, but not for very much longer: the foreign conglomerate that had just bought the Newhall Land and Farming Company was planning to drop several hundred houses on top of them. Environmental groups were trying to persuade the conglomerate to rethink its plans, but it had refused to give an inch, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was ready to approve the project. It would be the largest single suburban development ever approved by the county.

We passed the turnoff to the town once known as Mr. Cook's Garden of Eden: Piru City, Ventura County, population 356. As we passed, I looked to the hills behind the town, where Mr. Cook's mansion had once stood. It had been reduced to ashes in 1982 when a painter dropped a torch on the roof. Ventura County fire-
men raced to the scene, but they couldn't find a fire hydrant. The trucks ran out of water as the mansion went up in flames. In the chaos, the firemen failed to notice the pool next to the house. While the mansion was burning, a television reporter asked Scott Newhall, “How does it feel?” “Wonderful,” Scott replied. “Really *&^&%$#@ great! How the hell do you
think
it feels to watch your house burn down!” The footage never aired.

Scott and Ruth Newhall, family friends and two of my personal heroes, were the owners of the mansion when it burned. They'd bought it in the 1970s when Scott moved out of the executive editor's office at the
San Francisco Chronicle
. When I was in college in Northern California, I used to visit them all the time. Scott told stories from the “wacko years” he spent at the helm of the
Chronicle
. Ruth repeatedly demolished me at Scrabble.

Scott died unexpectedly in 1987. But before he died, he and Ruth built a copy of Mr. Cook's mansion on the charred foundation of the first one. Except for the sprinklers in the new ceilings and the statue of a phoenix on one of the towers, the new house looks exactly like the old one. More precisely, it looks the way the old one must have looked when Mr. Cook built it at the end of the nineteenth century. I can see him standing on the turret at the top of a brand-new red stone tower, gazing out at the future metropolis of Piru City, California.

“Is that place a metaphor or what?” I really did say that as the new mansion came into view. Wallace didn't know what I was talking about and I didn't really want to tell him, so we drove on without saying a word. At Fillmore we swung north toward the birds, following the still-wild Sespe Creek to a sharply angled oil road etched into the side of a cracked, dry mountain. As we rose, we sank into the folds of this mountain, losing sight of everything behind us. Hammer-shaped oil pumps covered with rust bobbed
endlessly up and down. For a time the groaning of the pumps seemed to be the only sign of life. But as we neared the top of the oil road, the view changed radically as the sky took on a life of its own, looking bluer and deeper and bigger than I'd ever seen it look before. I could almost see the heavy winds that were pushing the clouds and the birds around. When Wallace stopped the pickup truck to open a gate, I heard the wind passing over us, rattling the leaves on the branches of the trees.

We passed the ruined shack that had been Carl Koford's home in the years before World War II. Just before dark, we reached the battered ranch house that served as a base for the condor field team. I sneaked Koford's portrait photo onto a shelf in the living room, over a fireplace that had just been condemned. Four more condors were to be released near here in the morning. Three were zoo-breds. The other was the wild condor Pete Bloom trapped in April 1987. Good old Igor.

The plan to put Igor back where he had come from was approved in December 2002, at a meeting of the condor recovery team in the education building at the Los Angeles Zoo.
¹
The first thing I saw when I entered the room was the big, stuffed gorilla in the glass case. Then I saw the big, stuffed tigers and the big, stuffed grizzly bear. They looked a little glassy-eyed, but that's to be expected when your eyes are made out of glass. I wondered what their stories were and when those stories had ended.

Several dozen people were sitting in rows of uncomfortable folding metal chairs, and more people were on the way in. According to the fat blue binders we were handed at the door, talk of Igor's future would come late that afternoon, after a review of the various substrates used to line the bottoms of portable kennels and before the discussions of “telemetry dilemmas,” “Listserv etiquette,” and something called “the Nixolite Experience.” Bruce Palmer, then the direc
tor of the condor recovery team, opened the meeting by announcing that the budget for the coming fiscal year would be $1.7 million. Palmer added that most of the money would be spent to repair aging captive breeding centers at the zoos. “One point seven million dollars is a lot of bucks, but unfortunately it's not enough,” he said.

A groan ran through the back of the crowd at that point. The field crews were not happy. They were the ones who were hurt the most by the perennial shortage of funding: eighty-hour workweeks on temporary contracts with pathetic benefits were more or less par for the course. Palmer didn't like it, either, but there wasn't much he could do: critics of the Endangered Species Act had been hacking away at the budgets for projects like this one for many years. The need to find out what was killing condors in the wild was desperate at this point, but the puny budget made that hard to do.

“I came into this program thinking I knew what was going on,” said Palmer when I talked to him later. “Turns out I didn't have a clue. Every time you think you understand this bird it does something nobody expected. As for the politics, you don't want to know. That's all I'm going to say.”

Talk of lead and misbehaving birds was much more civil than I thought it would be, partly because Noel Snyder and his allies had been encouraged not to attend. They'd tried to make the case for a ban on lead bullets at the last meeting of the recovery team, but that encounter had produced more heat than light. The state of California had commissioned a study of the lead-poisoning problem, but it wasn't likely to be ready for months. After the meeting, Snyder's strongest ally on the recovery team resigned from the Fish and Wildlife Service to manage a private refuge. Robert Risebrough, a toxicologist revered by some for the work he'd done to help convince the Environmental Protection Agency to ban DDT,
said he didn't think lead bullets were the source of the condor's lead problems. Based on what he called a preliminary study of lead readings from the condor's rangelands in California, Risebrough said the real problem could be polluted rain. Risebrough wondered whether rainwater with lead traces from many sources was collecting on the leaves of plants that were eaten by deer. When those deer were shot, or killed in more “natural” ways, the condors that came down to clean the carcasses would have picked up the accumulated doses. Risebrough thought this theory explained why blood-lead levels in the condors seemed to fall at the height of the hunting season, since that was also when the fall rains would have washed the lead off the leaves.

Risebrough said his theory didn't work for condors living near the Grand Canyon, where fragments of lead were often found in the gullets of dying condors. But he wasn't sure the poisoned birds that had turned up so far in Arizona were victims of a widespread hunting problem. Risebrough thought most of these dead birds had been done in by “a single mass-poisoning event,” implying that it almost certainly would not happen a second time. Later he would change his mind about this, but at the meeting I attended, he came across as a hard-line skeptic of Snyder's belief that hunters with lead bullets were the culprits.

Discussions of the misbehaving birds were even briefer, perhaps because no condors had been seen on Les Reid's deck for close to a year. Incremental signs of behavioral progress were reported by all of the field crews, and the consensus seemed to be that the birds were getting wiser as they aged. Condors brought up by puppets did not seem to be raising more hell than the other ones were, which wasn't entirely good, since the puppet birds and the parent birds were continuing to perform in front of cheering crowds of tourists at the El Tovar Hotel in the Grand Canyon.

The Igor discussion went by in a hurry, even though many people in the room seemed to have a lot to say about him. Behaviorists were worried that Igor might butt in on well-established pairs. Others said that didn't matter, as Igor was a well-known stud. Someone wondered why the zoos would want to give away a well-known stud; the answer was that Igor's genes were so well represented that his services were no longer needed.

In the wild, Igor would probably settle down with AC-8, the Matriarch, his old breeding partner: she had been the first condor taken from the wild to be released, a year before. AC-8 had also been a breeding machine, but she'd recently had a tumor removed, and veterinarians wondered if she'd become sterile as a result.

“Releasing AC-9 would make a pretty good movie of the week,” said Shawn Farry. “But is this more than a stunt? Maybe it's a good idea to put an older bird back into the wild with the young ones, but why does it have to be this one?”

The unspoken answer to Farry's question seemed to be “Why not?” as news that Igor was to be released could bring reporters by the dozens. But the trapdoor in the bottom of that argument was opened by botanist Maeton Freel of the Forest Service. Freel had spent a good part of his long career working near the condor refuge, where he'd watched Igor dodge the proverbial bullet many times. Freel remembered the dirges that ran in the papers when Igor was captured and taken to the zoo, and he knew there was a chance that this maneuver might not have a happy ending.

“What if he dies?” Freel said, silencing the muttering in the back of the room. “AC-9 has now spent more than half his life in captivity, and we really don't know what it's done to him. There's no way to predict what he will do in the Sespe for the first time in fifteen years.”