Nomi Morris

One of earth’s most ancient and magnificent creatures is dreadfully ugly to human eyes, at least when it is not spreading its enormous wings in flight. Today, the California condor is barely holding its own in the face of extinction, aided by a highly controversial program undertaken by the same upstart species that has been responsible for its near demise. Not surprisingly, the story of human beings and condors is both tragic and inspiring, heartbreaking and hopeful – but this relationship is also frequently bizarre, and occasionally hilarious.

THE FIRST TIME I heard the word “condor” was in Mr Murray’s class at Summit Heights Public School in suburban Toronto. It was 1971, and our free-thinking, pipe-smoking Grade 4 teacher was teaching us our first song on guitar, Simon and Garfunkel’s El Condor Posa. “I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail,” I strummed. “Yes I would. IfI only cou-ou-ould. I surely wou-ould. Hmm, hmm.” I dug my fingertips onto Å-minor and G, two sad and simple chords. “I’d rather be a forest than a street… I’d rather feel the earth beneath my feet.” Then my nine-year-old voice rose confidently as I stretched my hand over the C chord. “Awaaay. I’d rather sail awaaay …” It was a song of peace, and of harmony with nature. I imagined a dove-like bird, something between a sparrow and a swan.

Thirty years later, driving along the two-lane highway near our southern California home, I was startled by a huge winged creature sitting in the opposite lane. It stood about four feet high and had a bald red head, a hooked beak, and appeared hideously majestic. The oblivious beast was perched on a pulpy mass of road kill. My heart began to pound, but I couldn’t slow down on the highway to get a better look. The bird was a dirty grey-brown and far too big to be a turkey buzzard or any other vulture common to our area. Could it possibly be a condor? Aren’t they extinct? No one will believe me, I thought, straining to see it in the rear-view mirror as I headed around a curve. I felt as if I had seen a ufo, something alien and awe-inspiring. This was not an apparition from another planet, but from a previous age of our own earth – certainly not white and dove-like, as in my childhood imaginings.

AFTER READING John Nielsen’s Condor: To the Brink and Back – The Life and Times of One Giant Bird, I know that I am one of few who have, however fleetingly, come face to face with the mythical bird. Thriving during the Pleistocene epoch, revered by North America’s native tribes, and saved from extinction by American scientists in a controversial reclamation program, the condor’s fate is a case study of the confrontation between modern society and wildlife. Nielsen, an environmental reporter for National Public Radio, grew up in Piru, just 40 minutes from the Ojai Valley ranch where I now live. Both areas border the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. The Sespe – along with Big Sur, Baja, and an area of Arizona’s Grand Canyon – is a nature reserve where, over the past two decades, condors have been saved from extinction through a zoobased program of capture, breeding, and reintroduction to the wild.

From a low of fewer than 20 animals left in the late 1970s to a current count of more than 200, one can say that the California condor has, for the time being, been physically saved. But the real question, which Nielsen eloquently raises, is “at what cost?” Can condors hatched and raised in captivity, and released into a now foreign and non-sustaining wilderness, really soar as their ancestors did? With the birds clustering at residential patios for red meat handouts and dying of lead poisoning from hunters’ pellets lodged in animal carcasses, it is not clear whether the condor will ultimately prevail.

“Present and accounted for is far from saved,” writes Nielsen. “It could take a hundred years or more to truly save this species and no one thinks salvation is assured.”

Nielsen’s book is an action-packed biography of the California condor. More important, it recounts a five-decade conservation battle which the author cogently terms a “kind of scientific bar fight.” The fundamental argument – with bird lovers and naturalists lining up on both sides – is between a “hands-off ” and “hands-on” approach to saving a species. The philosophic brawl over how much to meddle with nature serves as a cautionary tale for North American conservationists bracing for the impending extinction of dozens of wildlife species as a result of global warming.

Nielsen begins his tale with his own childhood sighting of a condor in the 1960s as the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles headed northward into the chaparral-covered hills at the edge of Ventura County. He describes himself standing on a cliff when he heard the rumbling roar of the bird with the nearly 10-foot wingspan.

“Once this bird gets into your head it does exactly as it pleases. You can try to shoo it away, do it harm and forget it’s even there, but the condor will still be there in the background somewhere, biding its own sweet time. Then one day it will rise, spread its giant wings, lean into the wind and own you.”

The first half of the book traces the condor’s history: through the eyes of paleontologists, then through the reverential lore of California native tribes – complete with the uncomfortable fact that a passion for native headdresses made from dead condors may have contributed to the vulture’s decline. Nielsen recounts condor sightings by early explorers and the pursuit of the bird by both hunters and “skin” collectors trying to secure museum specimens. A century ago, there was a craze for collecting condor eggs, which peaked at a market value of $500 per egg.

An entire chapter is devoted to Carl Koford, the “patron saint of condor field research,” who observed condors in the wild between 1939 and 1946, interrupting that work only to serve as a navy airborne scout during World War II. Koford’s 3,500 pages of field notes – at a time when about 60 to 120 condors were left – gave a scientific imprimatur to those who argued the birds could be saved only if they were provided sanctuaries that were entirely closed to humans – not just to logging and development. In 1947, the US federal government designated 53,000 acres for that purpose. As a young man, Koford had entered condor caves and handled the birds, but he ultimately came out against any human contact with these animals. His views galvanized those who later opposed the trapping of the last wild condors, which was carried out to stave off extinction.

It was Richard Nixon who actually saved the California condor in 1973 when he signed an updated version of the Endangered Species Act, writes Nielsen. Enter Sandy Wilbur, another interesting character in the condor wars. Wilbur is a born-again Christian biologist who was chosen to head up the condor recovery program. As both a scientist and a creationist, he was dubbed “God’s condor man.” It would be wrong to presume that a Christian believer might urge man to step out of the way of God’s handiwork as the forces of nature progress. Instead, Wilbur believed that saving the condor – as Noah had done before him – was “doing the work of the Lord.” As an advocate of the trapping and breeding program, he provoked the ire of “hands-off ” environmental activists such as David Brower, who argued that the money and energy would be better spent curbing development than saving a dying species. In the late 1970s Brower wrote that it wouldn’t be long before visitors to southern California were greeted by highway signs reading “Los Angeles – next 250 exits.”

“Such a grim future, with its coalescing cities and suburbs, will have far too little room for people and no room at all for condors,” wrote Brower.

His prediction came true quickly enough. Today, many southern Californians are appalled when bears, coyotes, or even mountain lions wander into their neighbourhoods; they seem stubbornly unaware that it is humans – with their residential subdivisions and strip malls that are the invasive species in the animals’ habitat. This story is very similar to that of British Columbia’s suburban cougars and bears, and the alligators that routinely turn up in Florida backyards.

Brower and others argued that the very conditions that were causing the condor to die out made it unsafe to return zoo-raised birds to nature. But the condor dissidents have been overruled by those determined to save the species, no matter what it takes.

THE 1980s proved a difficult but hopeful period as a “SWAT team” of ornithologists headed into the bush, collecting freshly laid condor eggs and ultimately catching the last known wild condor, “Igor,” who in 1987 was deposited at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. This was an era of great activism on behalf of the condor; field teams raised the alarm when they saw condors disturbed by missiles and fighter jets from Vandenberg Air Force Base. And they convinced NASA to bring the space shuttle down in Florida rather than at California’s Edwards Air Force Base after an arriving space mission caused a sonic boom even louder than the noise from jet fighters and missiles.

As a journalist, Nielsen brings these escapades to life with colourful prose. “Parent birds sitting in caves rose and ambled forward like old folks in slippers shuffling out to get the Sunday paper,” he wrote of a pair of condors who were deliberately distracted from guarding their nests by the voices of field scientists waiting to grab a fresh egg. Meanwhile the battles were intensifying, with the Audubon Society going to court in an attempt to halt the trapping program.

By the late 1980s the last 27 California condors in existence were living at either the San Diego Zoo or the Los Angeles Zoo. Eggs that had been taken from condor nests in the wilderness were hatching at the zoos, but captive birds had not yet begun to breed.

Nielsen recounts the tale of Topa Topa, a condor named after the rugged rock bluff that overlooks the Ojai Valley. Topa was wild and angry and had to be kept in solitary confinement. During a four-day encounter with a female condor presented to him for breeding, he not only failed to seduce her, but turned into an abusive mate. Eventually Topa did rediscover his sexuality and – after trying to mate with zookeepers and a stray plumbing pipe – he fathered an egg. By 1991 the count of live condors in captivity was up to 52.

The zany antics of both the condors and their captors are a fascinating read. But the notion that the reclamation drive – however unpleasant – had to be undertaken gives way before long to bitter uneasiness as Nielsen describes the daily life of zoo condors and the fate of those that were reintroduced to the wild. While animal handlers did their best with the condors in captivity, using rubber puppets to raise chicks doesn’t exactly mimic nature. And the birds quickly became accustomed to humans and an easy food source. Everyone celebrated when the first two condors were released in 1992. But one of them had to be recaptured because it was too tame to survive on its own. The other died after drinking from a puddle of antifreeze.

Les Reid, a former Sierra Club director who lives in a remote area of central California, one day found eight condors had broken through a screen and were sitting on his bed. Nielsen describes them – and a group of maladjusted condors released in Arizona – as “acting like a gang of bored punks.” It got worse. Several died when they flew into power lines or tried to roost on utility poles. Zookeepers responded with an “aversion therapy” program, administering electric shocks to captive condors whenever they rested on something looking like a power pole. Handlers were also required to “rough up” the birds – without hurting them – so they would not become too comfortable around humans. In the end, the whole noble endeavour becomes morally compromised as humans do more and more outlandish things to ensure the condors can function back in the bush.

In 2000, condor expert Noel Snyder published a report in the scientific journal Conservation Biology arguing that the birds were dying in the wild as fast as they were coming out of the captive breeding program. The program, said Snyder, had become a “stocking operation.” It took constant vigilance to stop any number of potential catastrophes, such as the building of a wind turbine farm near Gorman, California, that experts feared would become a “condor Cuisinart.” Nielsen also describes condors dying after ingesting pull-tabs from soda pop cans, as well as assorted plastics and shards of glass.

By its end, the tale becomes an emotional roller coaster with the author alternating between hope and despair. Nielsen goes into great detail on the slow death by lead poisoning of several condors. But he strikes an optimistic note when Igor is released in 2002. Then we learn of the tragic shooting death six months later of the “Matriarch” – Igor’s last mate in the wild during the 1980s – by a hunter who claimed he didn’t know she was a condor. The book ends on a note of ambivalence as Nielsen describes his last sighting of Igor, near his hometown of Piru.

“I saw him circling slowly around a rising column of wind in the middle of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary,” Nielsen writes. “When he reached the top of it, he seemed to pause and scan the wildlands below him. Then he flexed his wings and veered off to the south, toward the smog.”

Twenty million dollars has been spent on the California condor, an animal that Nielsen tells us has no ecological value. The author probes our deepest impulses in describing the devotion of so many people to a quirky and unattractive bird that confronts us with our own failings and our own mortality.

“This is a vulture that cools its legs by peeing all over them…. it’s a bird that decorates the walls of its caves in layers of feces and vomit, a bird whose bald, red and badly scarred head makes it look like the survivor of a terrible fire,” he writes.

Perhaps we look to the condor, who has lived millions of years longer than we have, for clues to our own survival. As I composed this book review, a 130,000-acre wildfire was burning in the Sespe reserve. At a public meeting in nearby Ojai, residents voiced concern not only for their homes and well-being, but for the 61 known condors that dwell on the other side of the ridgeline and fly hundreds of miles a day, but seldom show themselves.

A rare chick that hatched last spring was close to taking its first flight when winds blew the fire right up to its nest. Biologists monitoring the family took a last glimpse of the turkey-sized baby condor, named No. 412, before they themselves had to evacuate. Adult condors can fly to safety, but field observers worried that little 412’s parents might abandon him amid the heavy smoke and ash.

Three weeks after the fires subsided, I was still wondering about hatchling No. 412, who had been spending his childhood beyond the Topa Topa rock face above our ranch. I emailed the Los Angeles Times reporter on the beat, and she assured me the chick had been sighted and was healthy. Reassured, I pulled my old acoustic guitar down from the closet and sat outside as the sun was setting. With pick in hand, I looked toward the Sespe, where a few of Nielsen’s condors are flying free while we humans are mired in the environmental mess we have made. I instinctively started to strum El Condor Posa, and privately dedicated it to condor chick No. 412. “A man gets tied up to the ground,” I chanted quietly. “He gives the world, its saddest sound, its saddest sound.”