Condor (18 page)

The condor that was known as AC-9 or Igor was returned to the wild in the fall of 2001 with a new set of numbers on its wings. Condor biologists who track his movements say he seems to be thriving. (Anthony Prieto)

The matriarch, also known as AC-8, free in better days. (Anthony Prieto)

Last year, after having a tumor removed and surviving a severe case of lead poisoning, the matriarch was shot dead by a pig hunter who said he didn't know what condors were. (Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

A
scientific SWAT team rolled into the Sespe in the summer of 1980, ready to do whatever it took to save the condor from extinction. Fights over whether the birds should even be approached by humans were now officially beside the point. The condor's only hope was what a panel of prominent scientists had described as a “long-term large-scale program involving a greatly increased research effort, immediate steps to identify and conserve vast areas of suitable condor habitat,
and
captive propagation.” Activists such as David Brower and the McMillans still seethed when people mentioned the zoos, but a panel of esteemed ornithologists had swept those objections off the table by arguing in no uncertain
terms that the time to take a number of “drastic steps” had come. Captive breeding wouldn't be enough if the birds not taken to the zoos were left alone. According to the panel those birds had to be trapped, “individually marked and fitted with radio transmitters, provided it proves possible to do so in a reasonable time and without undue trauma to the birds.” The tags and transmitters were supposed to make it easier to follow the condors around, which in turn would help researchers study “seasonal distribution, daily foraging range, habitat use, population size, and reproduction by free-living birds.” All of these things could be done in other ways, but not as quickly, and time was now of the essence.
¹

No endangered species team had ever taken on a job this big and complicated. On the other hand, there'd never been a team that seemed to be so well prepared. Congress had not only agreed to spend millions to support the last-ditch program, it had also agreed to formally deputize the National Audubon Society by allowing it to share control of the new program. The man the society picked to represent it was John Ogden, a highly regarded ornithologist based in the Florida Everglades. The federal half of the director's chair was taken by Noel Snyder, the leader of the Condor Recovery Program in the 1980s and a raptor expert with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Advocates of the hands-off school of condor management thought Audubon had traded its soul, but other environmental groups were praising the society's willingness to put its staff, and a lot of money, where its mouth was.

Ogden and Snyder helped save the condor from extinction, but the price they paid was very high. Terrible mistakes were made in the field while they were in control. And every time something went wrong, they were blamed.

In the end, the pressure split the field teams they worked with into warring factions. Plans to keep some of the remaining condors
in the wild were eventually abandoned, and at one point the Audubon Society sued to stop the trapping.

But when Snyder and Ogden first drove their trucks into the sanctuary, bitterness and desperation were not part of the plan. Instead of trapping birds that might be followed to the zoo by angry crowds of protesters, they'd decided to start with something quiet and safe. Plans were laid to enter two nest caves and handle two chicks, taking various measurements and running various health tests. Both operations would be short and sweet, and both would be filmed and photographed. The footage would be used to help drum up support for their work.

That was the plan. Implementation began the next morning when the two men led a field team to the edge of a sandstone cliff eighty feet above an active nest site. Two adult condors were inside, tending to the chick that would later be known as Igor. The parent birds had long been known as a bitterly unhappy couple, always bickering and pushing each other out of the way, and the bickering had gotten worse since Igor's hatching. Birds such as this have been known to attack approaching humans, but this pair wasn't so tough, flying off the minute they saw Snyder heading down to their cave, followed by a young biologist and climber named Bill Lehman.

Snyder went in ahead of Lehman, quickly cornering Igor, who was then a fuzzy feathered blob with tiny legs and a tiny beak. Igor didn't struggle when the vet picked him up and measured his stubby black wings, or when the vet put the bird into a horse's feed bag so he could weigh it. “He was calm and curious and totally relaxed,” as Lehman remembered. “It was as if he'd been expecting us.”

The vet took a few more measurements and a sample of Igor's blood. In the future, he planned to do the same to other condor chicks, taking the same measurements and running the same health
checks. That would help build on the information gathered by Koford, Sibley, and Wilbur, thickening the baseline and unraveling the answers to especially vexing questions: Why do some of the breeding pairs fail to make eggs? How do condors find their food? How do the birds protect their eggs from bears, coyotes, eagles, and ravens for starters, and from a host of smaller predators after that? Are the condors starving or are they being poisoned? Are the numbers going up or down?

“We needed information,” Snyder said. “Everybody had a theory then but nobody had the database they needed to support their point of view.”

Igor's checkup lasted ten minutes. As the researchers climbed back up the cliff, the parents returned and went right back to bickering, acting as if they'd never left. Snyder and Ogden were encouraged by this, and so they agreed to go ahead with the plan to examine a second chick in the morning. Then, they'd catch a flight to Africa to study the habits of some of its most condorlike vultures.

“We were off to a great start,” said Snyder. “There wasn't any reason to think it would change.” He said he and Ogden were in high spirits when they reached another cliff the next morning. Neither man could see the cave below this cliff, or the chick in the back of it. But they knew the cliff was steeper and more treacherous than the one they'd climbed the day before, so they decided to play it safe by sending down a smaller team. Since Ogden, Snyder, and the still photographer weren't skilled climbers, they decided to remain on top of the hill above the nest site. But Bill Lehman and the cameraman were both professional climbers, and they both wanted to go down.

Lehman dropped over the edge first, moving swiftly and easily down to the cave entrance.

“I entered the cave entrance and saw the chick back away and hiss a few times. It was much bigger than the other one, and a bit more frantic. Took me a while to corner it and pick it up, but then it squirmed and got away.”

By then, the cameraman was behind him. With the camera rolling over his shoulder, Lehman maneuvered the chick back into the corner and caught it a second time. It was still squirming, and he was forced to hold it tighter than he wanted to. After a few seconds, he managed to squat down and stick the bird between his knees. He reached into his backpack and took out a caliper.

Jan Hamber, a condor expert with the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, was watching the scene through a sighting scope on a distant cliff. “I could see that Bill was having trouble,” she said. “The bird was putting up a fight and things were taking a long time. When he got the measurements done, he tried to put the bird into a feed bag so he could weigh it, but that didn't work.”

The chick was too big. Lehman thought it might have fit into the bag if he'd pushed it a little bit but he didn't want to do that. So he put the chick back between his knees, emptied out his knapsack, and put the chick in there. He put it on the scale, took the bird out, and weighed the empty backpack.

It was at about this time that Lehman started feeling queasy. He'd had his hands on this chick for a long time, and something about the way it was acting worried him. But he didn't know what it was and he kept going. He was in the homestretch now.

“I was a good soldier,” he told me later. “I was going to get the job done. I was taking the very last measurement when the chick started shaking.”

The cameraman turned his camera off and yelled at Lehman—“Something's wrong with the bird. Put it down! Put it down!” Lehman put it down. It wobbled a bit, then fell over.

Lehman can't remember whether he had a walkie-talkie with him in that cave. If he did, he can't remember using it. “When the chick started having problems I walked out to the front and yelled, ‘Hey! We've got a problem down here!' Or something like that. They yelled back and told me to sprinkle some water on the bird, so I did. But by then it was too late.”

The chick had stopped breathing. Lehman stared down at it, knowing it was dead. After some more yelling, he picked up the carcass and put it in the backpack. He tied the backpack to a rope thrown down from the top of the cliff, and stood back to watch the bird ascend. Then he climbed up after it, moving very slowly.

“That was the longest climb of my life,” Lehman says. “It seemed like it took six months. When I got to the top Noel was right there, and right away he asked me to show him how I held the bird. When I did, he said, ‘Okay. Don't worry. It's not your fault. This is my responsibility.' He didn't have to say that, but he did, and I will always be grateful.”

Statistically this was a flesh wound. But Snyder knew that wasn't the point. “The condor had been so deified by the wilderness people that it was going to be like killing Jesus Christ to lose this bird.”

Snyder was right about the activists—they were in a state of rage before the carcass of the chick was off the mountain. Dave Phillips of Friends of the Earth got an early call from a friend at the Sacramento office of Fish and Wildlife. He turned around and called David Brower. Brower talked to other environmentalists and a lot of reporters and elected officials. Then he sent a telegram to Cecil Andrus, a friend who was also the Secretary of the Interior, urging him to fire the Snyder and Ogden teams and abandon the last-ditch recovery plan. Other activists urged the state of California to do the same thing. Some made a special point of questioning the role of the National Audubon Society in an episode that was variously de
scribed as an act of “stupidity in its most basic form,” a “breach of responsibility,” and a “glaring dereliction of trust.” All of those phrases appeared in a letter that was written by Eben McMillan; it urged the California governor, Edmund Brown, to reverse the state's decision to allow the National Audubon Society to function as a quasi-judicial agency. “The National Audubon Society has no place in setting policy nor of being responsible for the welfare found within the confines of our own state lands,” he wrote. “Audubon is a private agency in no way beholden to the demands of our people.”
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Brower and Phillips asked to see the film of the disaster. Snyder says he sent it without delay. Hands-off activists showed the film to local groups of bird-watchers, criticizing Lehman's every move. Walter Cronkite mentioned the death of the chick on the
CBS Evening News
, and Dave Phillips did a frame-by-frame analysis for National Public Radio.
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Spokesmen for the new research team said the bird had been properly handled. A necropsy report from the San Diego Zoo listed the cause of death as a heart attack triggered in part by “stress,” adding that the heart of this particular chick was slightly larger than normal. The implication was that the chick may have been unusually fragile.

Brower and his colleagues jumped all over that claim, charging that Lehman, an obvious novice, should never have been asked to single-handedly restrain and measure an oversize condor chick in a cave where he couldn't be seen or heard by his superiors. Brower added that he was appalled by the claim that only Lehman and the photographer had the climbing skills needed to rappel down to the cave: “Having helped teach some ten thousand Army men how to rappel safely [and a Secretary of the Interior, too], I know the team should have and could have learned to get down to the nest themselves.”
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Brower urged Lehman to quit the recovery team and join the hands-off faction. “As the person in whose hands the condor chick died, and as a man who is obviously deeply distressed by the tragedy, you could wield enormous influence,” he wrote in an open letter that urged Lehman to call for a return to more “Kofordian” condor research, in which “ecological understanding” would be reached by “careful, patient observation.”

Lehman took the offer to defect as an insult. First of all, he thought it had a patronizing tone. Second, he hated Brower's habit of sending copies of his letters to the press. Most important, Lehman didn't think Brower knew what he was talking about. In his view, the time for “careful, patient observation” was officially over.

While these kinds of interchanges were under way, Snyder was offering to quit. He said his superiors in Washington rejected his offers: “They told me it would look like an admission of wrongdoing if I resigned.” Snyder replied that his offer to quit was supposed to be just that. But he understood the logic and so he stayed on, working with Odgen. Both men knew the hands-on program would soon be suspended and perhaps abandoned completely. Snyder said it never crossed his mind that this fiasco might turn out to be a lucky break. But in a way that's just what happened.

 

Weird things transpire when you sit behind a fake wall of leaves in the middle of nowhere watching condors all day long for weeks on end. First, you forget what time it is. Then you lose track of the days. You watch a group of male tarantulas march en masse in pursuit of some females. You see a rattlesnake slither past you to the edge of a puddle, where it flicks its tongue in and out of the water like a strong but flickering flame. After that you might see a makeshift balloon with something hanging underneath fly by: rais
ing your binoculars, you see what firefighters call “an arsonist's balloon,” a flaming can of something that resembles Sterno hanging from a paper bag.

Then, if you're lucky, you'll point your binoculars at the nest cave again, just as a tiny beak busts through the top of a big bluish egg. You might see the parent birds push the egg off a cliff by accident. You might see a golden eagle strike like a flash of lightning. Parent condors might play with their young out on the ledges, watching you watch them watch you.