Condor (6 page)

Pete Bloom caught Igor the next morning. The ceremonial powder provided by the tribal leaders was sprinkled onto Igor's back at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

O
ff the coast of Terrestrial Paradise, 1602: A sailor in the rigging of a Spanish ship would have been the first to see the creatures with the huge black wings rip into the beached carcass of the whale. It's not likely that the man in the rigging would have known what he was looking at. The captain of the ship called the
Santo Tomas
kept his distance from the uncharted shore. Also, it's likely that the sailor in the rigging would have been unable to see much of anything clearly. In the early 1600s, crews on sailing ships like this one were routinely hammered by scurvy, a horrible disease that at the time had no known cure. It was not unusual to lose half a crew to the outbreak, which meant that crewmen who were not about to fall over dead would have to keep on working, ignoring the running sores, and the swollen gums, and the hallucinations.
¹

Our hypothetical crewman would have been illiterate, but he would have known the plot of
Las Sergas de Esplandián
, the wildly adventurous epic poem written by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo.
He would have known of the warrior women living on de Montalvo's rugged island: “Amazonians” who seduced the crews of passing ships to get pregnant. Afterward, the men were killed and fed to the “innumerable wild beasts,” including the griffins with giant wings and the heads and bodies of lions. Male babies born to warrior women were left in the caves of the griffins, who ripped the babies up and fed the pieces to their young.

Picture the confusion on the face of our half-crazed sailor as he squints toward the scene onshore. Could the stories about the flying lions be true? The wings he sees look big enough, but what's that above the shoulders? Could it be the head of a lion?

In the 1600s, it was plausible that scurvy-ridden Spaniards in the rigging could have had these thoughts. These men had been raised to vanquish armies led by warrior eagle gods and giant feathered snakes. Many dreamed of looting cities of gold, and some still feared that the boat they were on would sail off the edge of the Earth. In that context, griffins would have come as no surprise.

But here's what we know for certain: A ship called the
Santo Tomas
really did pass the carcass of a whale being eaten by condors in 1602; sailors, armored soldiers, and a Catholic priest went ashore to investigate the scene. Instead of Amazonians, they found hordes of grizzly bears; instead of griffins, they found condors. That much is recorded in the diaries kept by Father Antonio de la Ascension, the barefoot Carmelite friar and record keeper for the Spanish expedition.

“Birds the shape of turkeys,” the friar wrote. “The largest I saw on this voyage.” This clipped account is the first known written reference to a California condor, and one of the few firsthand accounts of condors eating dead whales. “Here indeed is material with which to stir the most dormant imagination,” wrote condor historian Harry Harris in “The Annals of
Gymnogyps
to 1900.”

Father de la Ascension was not so overwhelmed. Like the Spanish scribes who followed him, he rarely did much more than note the bare existence of the condors. I suspect that this was true in part because the word “extinction” had no meaning then, or at least not the meaning it has today. Animals that disappeared were meant to disappear, and it wasn't necessarily permanent; if God wanted something back, all he had to do was snap his fingers.

But the notion that the world was limitless was changing in the 1600s, thanks to a wave of commercial extinction driven by a global fur trade. In the 1500s, European royal families started wearing garments made of fur. By the time our friar saw those condors on the beach, squirrels, foxes, martens, and weasels had been all but erased from the forests of Europe and Siberia.

By the middle of the 1700s, Russian hunters were headed for the condor's feeding grounds. At the far edge of the ocean they paused to kill all Russian coastal fur seals. Then they moved west across the Bering Strait, looking for the rookeries. When the islands in the Bering Sea were bare, the Russians worked their way down the coast of Alaska; when those animals disappeared, the Russians trapped their way down the coast of North America, wiping out the fur seals, harp seals, harbor seals, and walrus.

Condors had less to eat when the Russian traders moved on. Whales were still around, but the beaches weren't thick with them. The carcasses of animals such as tule elk and pronghorn were also available, but that might not have been enough to hold the condors in the long run.

The king of Spain stepped in and saved the species at this point. It's likely that he'd never even heard of condors, but the birds came with the land, and he wanted the land. Rumors that the Russians were preparing forts to protect their pelt-trading interests were enough to convince Juan Carlos III to make a bold move of his own: he would string a line of forts and missions north from the tip of Baja California. Spaniards living in Mexico were ordered to go north and settle in uncharted wilds. Indians would tend to the needs of the settlers after being brought to Jesus. Those who declined would be dealt with. Those who worshipped old gods would be sent to hell.

In 1769, the “Sacred Expedition” left the bustling tip of Baja California, bound for Alta California and the heart of the condor's domain.

Mounted soldiers wearing heavy leather armor rode their horses through the heat, armed with leather shields, heavy guns, heavy swords, and extremely heavy lances. Two other groups of soliders boarded warships in La Paz; the plan was to meet in San Diego and march forward en masse.

Amazing things would happen to members of the Sacred Expedition. Horrible things would happen, too, but I'll get to those stories later. First I want to tell you about the mangy, nervous animals that trailed behind the armored, sweating horsemen; these are the animals that saved the California condor from extinction by dominating Alta California for the next one hundred years at least.

Alta California was God's gift to the animals we call cows; almost
everything about the place seemed tailored to their needs. The grazing lands were endless, the weather was perfect, and the relevant diseases were mild. “The growth and development of the range livestock industry in the New World was a phenomenon without precedent,” wrote the cattle expert L. T. Burcham in the book
California Range Land
. It was the foundation of the domestic economy of Spanish California.
²

Cows have been described as “the forward elements in the column of civilization,” but in California they were more than that. The line of missions laid out by Father Serra in the wake of this forced march to the north would not have survived for as long as it did but for these scrawny cows. And the condor would be extinct.

These were not the kinds of animals a living soul would recognize as cows: they were not fat and square and uniformly healthy-looking and they did not live their lives in pens. They moved through landscapes never seen by Europeans, mowing down all the native grasses they could find. Most of these cows had long, skinny legs joined to narrow hips and badly swayed backs. Their heads have been described as “combatively coarse,” which probably means they were ugly.

But if twitchiness and paranoia can be taken as a sign of animal intelligence, Spanish cows were very smart indeed. “These cattle had a quick, alert restless manner,” wrote an early student of the breed. “They have been likened to wild animals, continually sniffing the air for danger.”

There was plenty to sniff for. Mountain lions stalked the cows that strayed from unfenced herds, waiting for the chance to leap onto their backs and rip their throats open. Lots of other wildcats tried to do the same.

Then there were the grizzly bears. They were better at killing cows than all the other nonhuman predators combined, and of the
humans, only Spanish horsemen armed with rope knives matched the grizzly's lethal speed and grace. Tracy Storer and Lloyd Tevis, authors of
The California Grizzly
, collected several written reports of grizzlies luring cattle in for the kill by lying on their backs in pastures and kicking their paws up in the air. When cows saw this playful scene, they came over to take a close look, and the grizzlies quickly knocked them dead. “The cattle will surround the bear in a wondering and gaping circle,” wrote a man who claimed to have seen such killings. “Until [the bear] who is all the while laughing in his paw at their simplicity seizes upon the first cow that comes within the grasp of his terrible claws.” Afterward, the grizzly bear walks off with his next meal, “who thus pays the expense of the performance.”
³

Teams of grizzlies may have worked together back then, with one diverting the attention of a mark away from an approaching pair of killers. One barely believable account described a steer that stopped to watch a bear roll himself up into a ball and tumble down a hill into a pasture. “Suddenly at angles from either side two other bears rushed forth,” the story goes, “and almost before one could tell what was happening the larger of the two had reached the great steer.” At that point, it was over for the unlucky bovine: “Bruin with paw as heavy as lead felled the steer to the earth.”

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.

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.