Condor (13 page)

Eben and Ian McMillan helped Koford meet Truesdale and many of Truesdale's old competitors. Then they showed him how to get around. In the 1940s, no one knew the condor's range like the McMillan boys did, and they passed all that knowledge on to Koford. They fed him and took care of him, and defended his work when Pemberton and Harrison faded from his life, and when Koford left the country in the 1950s, the McMillans spoke for him.

People who have made their way through all 3,500 pages of Carl Koford's field notes say that his image of the condor seemed to change when he returned from the Pacific Theater. References to condors disturbed by people seemed to get a lot more common, as did the idea that condors were less sanguine than they looked:

Koford said the condors were rattled by the sounds of trees being cut and the sounds of airplanes flying over their nest caves. “Even the buzz of a motion picture camera 100 yards from a perched adult appears to be noticed…,” he wrote. Still photographers were even more of a problem.

Koford's study was hailed as definitive long before it was published by the National Audubon Society in 1952. In 1947, the federal government turned his study area into a 53,000-acre condor sanctuary, tearing out the hiking trails and locking out the fishermen and hunters. Koford was delighted until he heard that the
place would be called the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, which was sure to draw the birders in.

Koford didn't think
anybody
should be let near the condors, including researchers like him. Watching from a distance on a limited basis was probably okay, but getting close enough to be noticed was essentially an act of violence. Koford had also become convinced that there was no justification for entering the nest cave with a condor still inside it. He had done it so many times, but those were mistakes he did not want to see repeated.

This was not a notion that went over very well in the scientific community; many critics say it helped accelerate the birds' decline. Noel Snyder, the leader of the California Condor Recovery Program for part of the eighties, called this philosophy “a curse that endured for nearly 30 years, totally inhibiting much needed research.”
⁷

There's no doubt that Koford helped to complicate the lives of the scientists who later tried to lay their hands on the last of the free-flying California condors. On the other hand, the condors would not have been out there if not for him. They would have been gone.

O
ne hot morning in the summer of 1966, my mom and dad told my sister, Kirsten, my brother, Peter, and me to get out of bed, put on our Sunday-school clothes, and walk down to the Piru train station. I knew right away that they'd gone nuts, since it wasn't Sunday and the train station had been closed for years.

Half an hour later we were riding east in an old-fashioned wooden passenger car attached to a gleaming steam engine that had been rented by the company my father worked for. When the train started rolling out of town, my Mexican friends rode their bikes alongside us, waving and yelling things that made me glad Mom and Dad did not speak Spanish.

This would be the last train to leave Piru for at least fifty years. When it was gone, the tracks were torn up and trucked off to a dump. But I didn't know that at the time, and the ride itself was fun, with booze for the grown-ups, food for the kids, and entertainment out the windows. Mom says there was a jazz quartet in one of the passenger cars, but that must have been a different ghost train. I don't remember hearing any jazz.

Halfway to our destination, a bunch of fake Indians rode out of
the orchards on some horses. Fake cowboys were chasing them, shooting fake bullets.

The Indians escaped by riding up the road that led to the county dump. We chugged eastward toward the former hog farm that was our destination, passing a notoriously dangerous motorcycle track and a work crew from the county jail.

The train ride through the valley was supposed to celebrate the end of an era, I was told—a time when the residents of Los Angeles proper called the towns at the edge of the Transverse Ranges “the home of pigs and prisoners.” As the train trip ended, we looked out at the beginnings of the master-planned community my father had been working on. In real-estate speak, the place was far too big to qualify as a suburb, being better suited to phrases like “semi-autonomous regional center,” “new town,” or “middle landscape.”

The city was called Valencia. I remember noticing that Dad was proud of what he'd helped accomplish. I also remember meeting the mayor of the
real
city of Valencia, who'd been flown in from Spain to mark the occasion. Later that day Peter was run over by a golf cart; when he turned out to be fine, we caught a ride home to Piru.

The historian Carey McWilliams once wrote that the history of Southern California is the history of its booms, and in the mid-to-early sixties, Los Angeles blew up like a bomb. The freeway to be known as Interstate 5 was under construction then, and suburban developments of every shape and size were chasing it north. These were changes you could see from parts of the condors' breeding grounds.

Ian McMillan, the rancher and well-known condor activist, thought of suburbs as abominations. In his book, he wrote about the fight to save the condor's world from the forces of suburban sprawl; he wrote of looking down upon their work one morning in May 1965 from the top of a mountain in the middle of the Sespe
Condor Sanctuary. Pointing his telescope toward the homes, McMillan claimed to see what he always saw when he looked down from this spot: “rows of new dwellings that seemed to have spread across a few new acres of bottom land.”

In 1965, the new town of Valencia would have looked as if it was rising all at once—homes, new shopping centers, an upscale golf course, and a Magic Mountain theme park. When Valencia was finished, this new part of California would be terraformed, clean and green, with no rotting cattle lying on the front lawns and no giant vultures in the trees.

McMillan didn't like the air pollution these new worlds produced. Up on that mountain in the spring of 1965, he'd been alarmed by the smog rolling toward him.

Ian and his brother, Eben, spent part of the sixties trying to update Carl Koford's work. When they weren't doing that they were fighting a $90 million proposal to dam Sespe Creek, the largest undammed creek left in Southern California.

The creek in question happened to run through the center of the condor's range, crashing down out of the mountains through a twisted set of high rock walls before leveling out and slowing down just behind the town of Fillmore. “The crooked Sespe is fantastic beyond anything man has yet constructed,” Ian McMillan wrote. “Even if it were not a main haunt of the California condor, the area would be worthy of care and preservation as an incomparable piece of wild country.”

Strenuous endorsements of this point of view were provided by the New York office of the National Audubon Society, and by Alden Miller, the man who had succeeded Joe Grinnell as the director of the influential Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. Miller left no doubt at all that he thought this plan would be a shot through the condor's heart. “There must be no yielding to development,” he said, while pushing to expand the sanctuary. “We need to hold rigorously to what is now set out to be protected land.”

The plan to tame the Sespe had been thought up with the help of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, which was then in the process of losing its first major political battle to David Brower and the Sierra Club. Two large dams and one diversion dam were to block the flow of the Sespe Creek, filling two large reservoirs and one twenty-five-mile conduit. With water from the reservoirs, local developers would be able to build more houses. Towns such as Fillmore would bloom as hunters, fishermen, and water-skiers stopped in on their way up to the dams, and as the water stored behind the dams fed more farms and homes. The reservoirs would be stocked with fish pumped out of local hatcheries, the new road through the mountains would make year-round ingress easy, the fully developed project would draw two million customers a year, and Ventura County would live profitably ever after.

Local folks behind the Sespe project didn't like it when the National Audubon Society marched into town and denounced them as a bunch of condor killers. Fred Sibley's job had just been created by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and nobody seemed to know what he was going to make of it. What exactly was an “endangered species specialist” anyway? Was it like being the condor's public defender?

“Forty-nine dirty birds” is what the prodam forces called the condors early on. But when the fight to save Sespe Creek got hot, they abruptly changed their tune.

After briefly arguing that human needs must come before the needs of giant vultures, the backers of the Sespe plan began to insist that the condor would be lost without them. “Audubon is interested in saving nothing but the condor,” wrote one supporter of the dams. “United Water Conservation group [named after the Ventura County United Water Conservation District] is a true conservation group. It wants to save vitally needed water
and
the condor.”

Carl Koford's old friend Ed Harrison supported the plan to dam the Sespe Creek and the plan to build an access road through the condor sanctuary. Harrison insisted that the condors weren't nearly so reclusive and fragile as Koford said they were. He also thought the condor's repuation would improve if more “recreationists” saw them while driving through the “preservation zone,” and surely this would make more people care about keeping the species alive. Approaching the birds could easily be prohibited, Harrison said. All you had to do was build tall wire-mesh fences on either side of the road.

Koford hated this point of view, as did everyone at Audubon. But Harrison insisted that the old approach had simply failed to save the bird. He thought the time had come to take more drastic steps to save the condors from extinction: if that meant building fences and keeping birds in captive breeding programs, so be it.

As far as I know, there are no records of Koford's reaction to Harrison's plan. But it's safe to say he did not jump for joy. Ian McMillan was more outspoken, as usual, arguing that “with the advice and cooperation of the condor cagers, the developers [have] embroidered their proposals of becoming fairy godfathers to the condor.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service threw biologist Fred Sibley into this fight in 1967 after Lyndon Johnson signed an early otherwise toothless version of the Endangered Species Act. With the money that signature freed, the service did something it had never done before: it hired a group of field biologists and sent them out to study the plight of four of the nation's rarest life-forms. One man was assigned to the black-footed ferret and another to the Everglades kite. A third was sent to Hawaii to report on several rare plants and animals.

The fourth assignment was condors. Hardly anyone applied. Eventually, it went to Sibley, who trained at Cornell University and was employed at the time by the Smithsonian Institution. When Sibley learned of the condor job, he was working on an island in the South Pacific, catching and banding albatross. When he heard that there'd been very few applicants, he called Fish and Wildlife to ask them why. Sibley says he was told that many had declined to apply because the job required expert climbing skills, which Sibley did not have. He applied anyway—and was quickly offered the job.

“I didn't hear the
real
reason there weren't many applicants until later,” he said. “Turns out nobody wanted Alden Miller ruining their career.”

Alden Miller died of a heart attack before Sibley got to California. When he died, Ian McMillan took his place on a scientific advisory committee formed to monitor Sibley's work. At the first meeting of this committee, Sibley laid out an extremely ambitious plan to assess and rank the threats to the condor's existence. First,
he would find every current and former nest cave in the condor's range. Stray feathers, eggshell bits, and scrapings of feces would be collected at every opportunity, so that they could be tested for signs of malnutrition and poisoning from pesticides. Maps of distribution and abundance would be drawn up and updated. Attempts to count the condors would be staged on an annual basis. Birds would be organized. Koford's claim that the condor was allergic to humans would be put to the test.

Sibley promised the advisory committee that he'd stay out of active condor nests while the condors were inside them, adding that he wouldn't enter them at all when the birds were breeding, hatching eggs, or raising condor chicks.

All but one of the members of the scientific advisory committee thought Fred Sibley's plan was a sound one; Ian McMillan did not. “I was horrified,” he said in an interview published in a book called
The Condor Question
. “I objected strenuously, and might have been a little harsh. But I felt I had to be. I was alone, absolutely alone, in the advisory committee.”

Ian McMillan was removed from this committee at the end of its first meeting in 1967. For the next three years, he never stopped trying to bring Fred Sibley down, constantly questioning his findings, his research skills, and his honesty. When Sibley helped coordinate the first in a series of annual condor counts, McMillan said the numbers were wrong; when Sibley said the condors might not be finding enough food, McMillan called it a “fallacy.”
¹

Outside condor country, Fred Sibley was known for both the strength of his fieldwork and the integrity of his findings. Jon Borneman, a condor “warden” hired by the National Audubon Society, said Sibley was also known for speaking his mind. “He was one of those people who never had time for b.s.,” Borneman said. “In that respect he was a lot like Ian.”

Sibley and McMillan never got the chance to talk about becoming allies, but in many ways that's what they were. Behind the scenes, Sibley was a scathing critic of both the U.S. Forest Service and the Federal Bureau of Land Management, each of which controlled the lands that surrounded the condor sanctuary. “Even in [the best of times] the condor takes second place to development,” he wrote in an angry letter to his boss back in Washington. “Unless the decisions are made at a higher level than district or forest, the condor is lost.” In another letter to the Washington office, Sibley seemed especially critical of the way the local Forest Service was run. “Voluntary cooperation of the [two men in charge of ] Los Padres National Forest appears to be impossible,” he wrote. “Both worship projects and measure development in terms of dollars spent. Secrecy has long been a strong weapon and is still used with annoying frequency.” Projects that might hurt the condor were approved and launched and then revealed to Sibley, whose angry responses were dismissed as moot because the condor was already doomed. This was an attitude the Forest Service tended to adjust to fit the exigencies of the moment. Roland Clement, a former vice president of the National Audubon Society, who was involved with condors at the same time as Sibley, told me that he once heard a local ranger insist that the condor could not possibly be endangered by a development proposal. When asked to elaborate, the ranger said he'd just seen a giant group of “baby condors” in a nearby canyon. Clement said it turned out that these “baby condors” were actually turkey vultures.
²

Sibley understood why the McMillans held “the feds” in such low regard. “They had ample reason to hate these people,” he said. “They were never given honest answers. This was true to the end and prevented us from forming any sort of friendship.”