Condor (3 page)

By then, David Brower had gone looking for the birds, overcom
ing previous misgivings. In 1984, at the age of seventy-two, he joined a group of bird-watchers near the summit of Mount Pinos, in Ventura County, where condors sometimes showed themselves. His hair had long ago turned white and he couldn't climb anymore, so he waited with the crowd near a parking lot, holding his binoculars.

“Then came my lucky day,” he wrote years later. “A pair of birds moved toward us, probably well attuned to the human throng on the Mount Pinos summit and adding to their own life list of people they observed.”
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Brower saw the large white triangular patches underneath the wings, and the big red fleshy heads on the periscopic necks.

“What those birds did for the wild sky lifted my heart and gave the vault above me a new dimension I had never paid attention to before,” he wrote. “I could wonder what it would be like to think the way a condor does, to sweep so much of creation at one glance, to know the wind.”

He was beside himself. “When you have waited seventy years to witness such a performance,” he wrote, “when you have been willing to forgo it if the witnessing might somehow affect the condor's survival, and when the display is finally there before you, you can be excused for feeling excited, euphoric, and especially privileged.”

When Brower and I spoke briefly on the phone after that, I asked him whether he'd go looking for a zoo-bred condor that had been restored to the wild. Brower said he didn't think he would live to see it happen.

Turns out he was wrong, but not by much.

 

The man in charge of the condor-breeding center at the Los Angeles Zoo had been sleeping on a roof near the breeding compounds with a rifle at his side. Mike Wallace might have heard an owl or
two above the endless drone of the traffic, but on most nights that was it, unless you counted the environmental activists climbing up the trees of Griffith Park, which surrounds the zoo.

“Earth First!, Animal Liberation Front, people like that,” he said. Wallace says the activists also tried to howl like wolves from time to time.

As the last few wild condors were brought to the zoos in the late 1980s, hard-line environmentalists kept hinting at plans to “liberate” the captive birds. Native Americans claimed their culture would officially die when the last wild condor was captured. At the Los Angeles Zoo, a man in a condor costume roller-skated back and forth all day in front of tourists, handing out leaflets that made it look like the zoo was an Alcatraz for condors.

Wallace thought a lot of these people were fools, but he tried to keep that thought to himself. Sometimes, he'd go out to try to reason with the activists, but those conversations went nowhere.

“Very weird times,” he said years later. “The PR staff was freaked out by the bad publicity, and by the thought that something terrible would happen when AC-9 was captured. They were like, ‘Oh my God, what if it dies in here?' I told them to relax. Good things were going to happen.”

Wallace told the staff to expect an uproar when Igor was captured, but assured them in a few days it would all die down and the activists would go away. The birds would breed and the chicks would grow into healthy wild condors. Then, barring a meteor strike, some of the condors born at the zoo would be released into the wild, and finally the Los Angeles Zoo would begin to escape its reputation as a minor-league institution. People would describe it as the place that saved the California condor, and not as a cheap imitation of the larger and richer zoo in San Diego. Wallace believed with all his heart that this was almost certainly the way the
future would play out, and when he said as much to the PR staff, it helped to calm them down.

But Wallace also knew there were outcomes to be feared. One of the fears was that the chicks produced by these birds would be deformed by a genetic disease. Or maybe the condors
would
refuse to breed in captivity; maybe their chicks would be tame. Returning condors to the wild would then be impossible. They were going to need a lot of luck at the zoos. Wallace kept that thought to himself.

“Nobody had ever done these things before,” he said. “We'd been forced to make a lot of key decisions without much information. You can work your ass off to prepare for these things, but you're never really ready.”

Wallace said he used the rifle he slept with on the roof of the zoo to shoot at the vermin. “Rats and foxes used to try to get to the breeding pens. I shot a few of them, no big deal. I grew up on a farm in Maine. I would never have thought of using it on the activists,” he said. “But the activists didn't know that, and that was fine with me.”

 

The mood was very different at the breeding center run by the San Diego Wild Animal Park, partly because it was set in the foothills of some dried-out mountains in a yet-to-be-developed part of San Diego County. Activists never climbed in the trees making unconvincing wolf sounds there. No one in a condor suit roller-skated in the parking lot.

But the park had gotten a host of threatening phone calls, and it was prepared for trouble: tall wire fences topped with concertina wire surrounded the facilities, and the guard who opened the gates checked strangers' IDs closely.

Inside the compound the rows of tall wire flight pens were cov
ered on all sides with plywood. Fourteen California condors were living in those pens at the start of 1987, leading what captive-breeding expert Bill Toone said were quiet, uneventful lives. Like Mike Wallace, Toone had been studying condors for most of his career, preparing for the day when the future of the species would be in the hands of the zoos. He was absolutely certain the wild birds would breed.

“No doubt whatsoever,” he said. “We'd spent years working Andean condors, and they were breeding prolifically. California condors were different birds, but not that different.”

But Toone was also a nervous wreck in 1987. Tensions on the field teams were alarmingly high, and he was sick of being portrayed as a “condor cager,” ignorant of the need to save habitats as well as birds.

Toone said he had always shared David Brower's urge to save more of the condor's rangelands, even though he didn't think there was a shortage of protected condor habitat. What he didn't share—what he detested—was the idea that the zoos had been plotting to capture all the condors for decades now. He blamed Brower and his allies for the condor decline, noting that they had snuffed a plan to breed a very small number of California condors in captivity in the early 1950s. Those would have hatched a lot of eggs, Toone argued—many more than they would have been able to produce in the wild. Those captive chicks would have grown up into condors that could have been released into the wild, said Toone. By the late 1980s, they'd have been thriving out there.

The magnitude of what it meant to take a condor out of the wild hit Toone one day in the mid-1980s when he climbed into a condor sanctuary to get to an egg a condor had just laid on the floor of a craggy-looking cave. Toone and biologist Noel Snyder were planning to take the egg to a zoo where it would be hatched and raised.
When the two men reached the cave, they noticed the mother of the egg was inside watching over it. Toone and Snyder hid and waited until the mother condor flew away. But, as soon as they entered the cave, Toone heard a vaguely musical roar approaching the cave entrance. He turned to see the mother condor swooping back and forth past the opening, hoping to make the egg thieves go away.

A wave of doubt washed over Toone at that moment. “It occurred to me that there was a living embryo in this egg—if it hatched in captivity, it would spend most of its life in a pen that was no more than forty feet wide, eighty feet long, and twenty-two feet tall, and this was a bird that soared at altitudes measured by the mile. In that instant I promised myself I'd stay with the program until a bird raised in captivity was released to the wild. Then I would walk away.”

Near the end Pete Bloom had a recurring nightmare: Igor lands on the carcass and Bloom catches him easily, but then he trips and falls on top of the bird, killing it instantly. Next thing he knows he is standing in front of a microphone at a press conference, looking out at glaring lights and hundreds of reporters. The press conference is endless, but there's only one question: How did it feel to kill the last free-flying condor?

Bloom had been waiting in the clammy darkness of the pit trap for several months now, but Igor had not taken the bait. The last free-flying condor saw the carcass, and he often circled down a bit to take a closer look. But he must not have liked what he was seeing down there—after a few minutes, most of the time, he would turn and fly away.

No one in the condor program was surprised to hear that Igor was the last bird left. He'd been closely watched and tracked since the day he hatched in the wild, and he'd always been remarkably independent, if a little klutzy. “When he was young, he was a very
friendly, curious bird,” said Bloom. “It was easy to approach him.” Bloom says Igor's friendly disposition held when the condor started looking for a mate. It kept holding when Igor's first attempts to breed went nowhere, partly because his mating dance seemed to go on forever, and partly because he kept attempting to mount his partners from the front.

Then in the eighties, the trapping started and Igor was never the same. Bloom says Igor was captured twice by people hidden in pit traps; once for blood tests, and once to have radio transmitters bolted to his wings. After those events, when approaching a carcass, Igor was exceptionally cautious, sometimes watching other vultures eat for days from the top of nearby roost trees.

Bloom said he'd looked up and seen this condor looking down as the other condors were captured. No one knows what the condor learned by watching other birds, but Bloom had a hunch his bird had learned to see the pit traps from the air. Maybe the mound of earth that covered Bloom's viewing basket was the clue that gave the traps away. Maybe it was the way the cannon nets were always buried.

Bloom also gave some thought to another explanation: maybe someone on the trapping team was tipping Igor off. “All you'd have to do was take a tiny mirror out and flash the sun into the condor's eyes. You might also make a sudden movement when nobody on the ground was looking. I was pretty paranoid for a while there.”

Bloom and his crew built a new kind of trap in April 1987; the pit and the viewing basket weren't placed so close to the carcass, and a row of small cannons rigged to fire a big net over the carcass was added and disguised as bushes. A long, buried black cord connected to the first cannon ran over to the pit trap and into the bottom of a plastic tube with a red button on top. Bloom held the trigger as he waited.

 

Igor did a lot of wandering in April 1987, sometimes flying north along the crooked spine of California's coastal mountains, or winding west through the Transverse Ranges. ID tags with great big
9
s on them hung from the front of his wings, and a radio transmitter was bolted onto the left wing. Teams of Igor trackers in pickup trucks had been chasing the beeps sent from the transmitter, but for weeks the last free-flying condor had toyed with them. Sometimes he hovered over the pickups, looking down at them. Then he'd turn and disappear over the top of a roadless mountain for several days, panicking his would-be captors.

Bloom's hopes rose on April 18, when Igor landed on a dead branch at the top of a tree near a trap. The bird stared down at the carcass for a while, but then he flew away. Bloom sent the crew home so some of them could spend the next day celebrating Easter. When Bloom was home he got a call from a radio tracker named Jan Hamber, who told him that Igor had returned to the tree and fallen asleep. Bloom immediately called the trapping crew back into the field.

Igor woke up late the next morning, as condors are wont to do. He lounged around and spread his wings to catch the sun, never leaving his perch. Several hours later, as if on a whim, he stepped off his branch and floated down toward the carcass. He landed just beyond the range of a big mesh trap net attached to four small cannons. He paused to look around for what Bloom remembers as an eternity.

And then the condor clomped past the basket and planted one of his fat pink feet on top of the carcass. After one more look around, Igor whipped his beak down, burying his head inside the carcass. For an instant, he was blind and deaf. Bloom pushed the button that fired the net.

Four bushes seemed to explode. A thin black line sailed out of
the ground between the bushes, spreading out into a net as it arced over Igor's head. As the bird began to run, there was another crash, and a bearded man flew up out of the ground.

Igor, running and flapping his wings, was one step from the edge of the net when Pete Bloom caught him. With his right arm, he closed the wings; his left hand closed the beak. When someone slipped a hood over Igor's head, the last wild condor stopped fighting.

Not long afterward, Igor was locked inside a medium-size dog kennel and driven to the Oxnard airport, in Ventura County. There he was loaded into a plane that did not go to Los Angeles, where activists were ready to rattle the fences at the Los Angeles Zoo, but to an airport in a rural part of San Diego County, the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Wallace and Toone had secretly agreed to make the switch to avoid the scene up in Los Angeles. By the time the demonstrators figured it out, it was way too late, said Wallace. No demonstrations were reported.

The stories that ran in the papers the next morning read like eulogies, which seemed appropriate. No matter what happened to the birds in the future, April 19, 1987, would now be marked as a low point in American environmental history. And here's what I have always considered the saddest thing about it: of the tens of millions of people now living in the condor's former rangeland, few know what condors are. Fewer still know what the condor used to be, or why that's so incredibly important.