Condor (11 page)

The condor's range was shrinking fast, especially in the south, where the city of Los Angeles was spreading out like a pancake on a griddle. In 1870, Los Angeles was a dying cattle town with a total of 5,728 residents; thirty years later, it was a booming city of 102,000.
Businessmen dreamed of Malthusian growth on lands to the north of the city, and on lands on the far side of the Transverse mountain ranges. Growth like that had long been kept in check by a chronic shortage of water, but in the twenties, everybody thought that problem had been solved. City engineer William Mulholland solved it back in 1915 when he formally opened the aqueduct that drained the Owens River Valley, sending water south across the mountains into Los Angeles.

If that boom had not gone bust, the California condor would have been doomed. That's just my opinion, but it seems like common sense if you think about the trend lines. The city of Los Angeles was shooting north toward the heart of the condor's domain. With it came more hunters, more hikers, and more rich folks who would try to buy the land. Houses would have popped up near the last of many dams built to hold the water taken from Owens Valley. This was the St. Francis Dam, which was completed in May 1928. It blocked a valley that drained into the Santa Clara River, which wound west toward the ocean past towns such as Piru, Fillmore, and Santa Paula. People would have bought into these towns and built them up before moving farther up into the mountains. Condors would not have been protected then. They would have quickly disappeared.

Everyone who's ever lived in these small towns knows why that future never happened: at 11:57
P.M
. on March 28, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed; forty-five million gallons of water began rolling toward the ocean, led by what at one point was a 180-foot tall wall of black water.
⁵
Houses, chunks of orchard, pieces of the dam, and bodies were also carried slowly forward by the flood. People who had cars were able to outdrive it. Those who tried to run were not so lucky.

Everyone I knew when I lived in Piru knew someone who was
there that night. At the local grocery store these people all told stories that kept kids like me awake on moonlit nights like that one. I would sit in bed and watch the hands on the clock hit 11:57. Then I'd listen for the eerie rumbling sound, described by some of the survivors as the distant roar of an approaching train; the wind in a giant pair of wings.

S
omewhere in the Bering Sea, 1943: The military catapult roars across the deck of the USS
Richmond
like a giant sprung trap, whipping the top-wing scout plane toward the windward side of the cruiser. The part of the catapult that holds the plane accelerates to sixty miles an hour in the space of fifty feet and then hits a padded brace and stops dead. But the single-engine Kingfisher equipped with three machine guns and one depth charge keeps on going, sailing off the deck and out over the water.

The jolting launch makes the pilot and crew of the plane feel like human cannonballs, but they're used to it. They know that when the
plane leaves the catapult behind, it will start to lose momentum, but only until the propellers seize the wind. At that point the scout plane will come to life and arc up into the sky. As the plane rises, Carl Koford will take out his maps and his binoculars and begin looking for Japanese warships. As he did this surveillance work, he must have thought about the bird he once described as the “acme of soaring flight.” After all, this was the man who would later produce one of the most influential and controversial endangered species reports ever written:
The California Condor
, researched before and after World War II and published in 1952.
²

Carl Koford is the patron saint of condor field research. During World War II, he was the barrel-chested kid in the rear cockpit of the navy scout plane, in between the pilot and the tail gunner. It was his job to scan the water for the periscopes of submarines while looking for potential bombing sites along the Alaskan coast. When he saw a vessel on the Bering Sea, he pointed it out to the pilot; their plane would circle down to buzz the craft until it raised the proper flag. Koford also watched the skies above the horizons for thin black dashes that could only be approaching planes: if the dashes you missed were Japanese Zeros, you could be blown out of the sky. Top-wing scout planes were easy targets compared to Koford's birds.
³

No one knows what went through Koford's mind when he was flying those surveillance missions. He was not allowed to even mention his work in letters to family and friends, and when the war was over he didn't seem to see the point in sitting around telling old war stories. But when the world's leading expert on California condors looked down out of his plane for signs of trouble, it's a good bet he thought about the vulture. Koford had been living in the company of condors when Pearl Harbor was bombed. When the war was over, he picked up where he'd left off, taking incredibly detailed notes on the lives of condors in the wild.

Carl Koford's study gave biologists a voice in fights affecting the future of the species, partly by providing them with a legally defensible set of scientific observations. After Koford, it wasn't enough for ranchers to insist that condors sometimes flew off with living cattle, or for hunters to insist that the birds would soon be gone regardless of what they did, or for the developers and agribusiness-men who wanted the condor's land to simply take it. After Koford, they needed proof. When they failed to offer it, the condor's defenders had a way to make them retreat—they had the “definitive” study of the bird, and they weren't afraid to use it.

Koford's book changed the political course of the condor wars by insisting that the bird was savable. Even more important, the study redefined the condor as a creature whose survival was tied to the fate of the wild. Koford's condor was a bird that needed isolation like fish need water. These birds could not be protected by rules that limited logging and hunting and fishing at the heart of their range; they needed refuges that were closed forever to humans, period. Koford wasn't the first to put this argument forward, but he was the first to try to back it up with facts he found in the field.

The need for these facts rose sharply at the end of the 1930s, when the U.S. Forest Service tried to build a road through a stretch of central California wilderness where condors bathed near waterfalls and nested in caves. When the road-building project was delayed by a proposal to turn the area into a sanctuary, the people who wanted the road called the bird an enemy of progress and a threat to the American way. “What Price Condor?” began an article that ran in
Field and Stream
in 1939. “The bird with the greatest wing-span has outlived its time.”

The author of this article was H. H. Sheldon, an exasperated businessman and naturalist who thought the road should be built. Sheldon didn't think the condor deserved the attention and support it was then attracting, given the ominous state of world affairs. Europe was a “powder keg” with war “sparking along the fuse”; Asia and Spain were places where bombs were “blasting children to bits.” A second world war was lurking out there somewhere, Sheldon feared, and of course he was right about that.

But when Sheldon read the papers in towns such as Santa Barbara, he didn't find articles warning of war. Instead he found headlines warning of a threat to a big black vulture that was doomed in any case. “In size and structure the condor is a magnificent bird,”
Sheldon wrote. “But its habits are deplorable and its purpose is finished.” Sheldon later qualified the line about the condor's magnificent size, reminding the readers of
Field and Stream
that “size alone is no guarantee of virtue. If the elephant had the habits of a hyena, no one would mourn its passing.”

Sheldon threw every insult at the condor he could think of, describing it as ugly, putrid, clumsy, obsolete—a downright “evil-appearing bird, dressed in a scrofulous black with bloody head”:

Sheldon did not understand how a bird like this could take precedence “over the siege of Madrid and [the saga of ] Americans stranded in Shanghai.” And “[f ]ew in the East have heard of it. Few in the west have seen it…And so little is known about it, even in the west, where it has lived through ages, that conservationists actually believe it can be saved from extinction by setting up sanctuaries for its use.”

Sheldon didn't think sanctuaries would do the bird any good, all but daring those who disagreed to prove their point. How sad it seemed to Sheldon that after failing to lift a finger to conserve the California grizzly, the state's “conservationists” would end up fighting for
this.
“I am a naturalist and a conservationist,” Sheldon wrote, “and [I] believe the passing of any species to extinction
would affect me with more regret than would assail the average individual. But to set aside a sanctuary in the belief that the condor will continue to exist is to act without knowledge of the facts.” What Sheldon left out was that there were no facts about the wild condors' needs, because no one had ever sat and watched them live their lives.

Koford was living in the mountains that were the condors' home then—a place called the Sespe, because it had once been part of the vast Sespe Ranch. The research grant that put him there, funded by two rich condor enthusiasts, required him to work alone and at a distance from the condors, save for the occasional photo. His goal, as he put it, was to “discover, investigate and record
all
obtainable…data dealing with the natural history and especially the environmental relations of the California condor.”

This project was the brainchild of Joseph Grinnell. This was the same Joe Grinnell who'd fought attempts to limit “shotgun ornithology,” but by the 1930s, it was clear that these birds needed a different kind of attention. Grinnell didn't think there were more than twenty-five pairs of California condors left in the world in the late 1930s, and it was his hunch that those numbers were falling. Farmers and ranchers had been killing off ground squirrels and other rodents by spreading a slow-acting poison called thallium across a good part of the condor's range. Grinnell thought the practice was insidious but hadn't been able to stop it.

He asked the National Audubon Society to help him cover the costs of the project, and the society jumped at the chance. Audubon was then the most powerful environmental group in the United States, but in the early 1930s, it had been consumed by in-house policy fights and bitter power struggles. John Baker, a Wall Street investment broker who was Audubon's director, was trying to harness the organization's wasted energy when Grinnell got in touch
with him. Baker said he would gladly add a condor job to a short list of projects to be covered by a brand-new Audubon Research Fellowship program. The ivory-billed woodpecker and the California condor would be the first two species studied.

Grinnell had one request. Audubon was “not to issue any publicity in relation to the California condor without submitting the same in advance for approval or rejection to those in charge of the research project at the University of California, and vice-versa.” This was supposed to make it harder for unscrupulous collectors to find the nest caves. But the real goal was to drop a cloak of invisibility over the entire refuge. Grinnell apparently thought the condor could be saved on a need-to-know basis. Carl Koford's job was to find out whether he was right.

Koford hitched his first ride into condor country in the spring of 1939, wearing the hobnailed logging boots he always took to the field. In his backpack was a letter of introduction from Grinnell, who was known to everyone in California who cared about wildlife. The letter said Koford was a man with a sensitive and unusual ecological mission, for “it is the knowledge of the
living
condors that he specially seeks”:

The famous naturalist never said why he picked Koford to do this particular job; Grinnell died of a heart attack in 1939. “I trust that you will have notified one or two of your colleagues to watch out for him,” said Grinnell in one of his last letters, to a friend in the U.S. Forest Service. “He is a quiet, earnest chap and will ‘wear well,' I predict.” Grinnell thought Koford might enjoy working in an isolated setting.

As it turned out, “enjoy” was not the word. Koford took to condor country like a feral cat with a notebook in its paw, stalking the birds for weeks on end, writing down everything. He always used a German technical pen with an extremely fine point. He always used one particular kind of notebook. He always copied his field notes into a second notebook before going to sleep, in script that's hard to read without a magnifying glass.

Field notation is a hoary art that greatly predates Charles Darwin, who started dividing living groups by species in the eighteenth century. But Koford wasn't looking for phylogenetic distinctions in the Sespe, or in finding a bug he could name after himself. What he did instead was to fill thousands of pages with descriptions of condor behavior. Hardly anybody studied so-called nonessential species in the 1930s, and when they did, they usually studied carcasses. But there was Koford, trying hard to write it all down. Wide-angle note taking of this sort was known as “the Grinnellian method,” in which “the behavior of the animal is described and everything else which is thought by the collector to be of use in the study of the species is put on record at the time the observations are made in the field.” If the day is overcast, you write that down. If the bird starts blinking, you start counting.

Koford was the first to note that parent condors rarely fly directly to the nest caves, choosing instead to land nearby and look around for predators. Instead of merely noting that a bird has landed, he writes about “a condor circling with legs dangling about 150 feet above the cliff,” and then touching down after making five quick backward movements with its wings. After this bird landed and opened its bill, Koford noted an “orange tongue lying on the lower mandible”; a few seconds later “its head gave one sharp shake as if to dislodge a fly.”