Condor (2 page)

T
he pit traps used to catch the last wild condors looked like shallow graves. When Pete Bloom slid down into one and closed the small trap door, he entered a clammy earthen trench that was six feet long, two and a half feet wide, and approximately four feet deep. It was hard to move around down there without smashing your head on the support beams; not moving meant dealing with cramps that paralyzed your back, neck, and legs. Bloom said he often passed the time lying on his back next to the walkie-talkie, waiting for word that the last of the wild condors had arrived.

He liked it down there. He had to. In 1985, they were his office. “Typically I went into them before sunrise and came out an hour before sunset,” he said. “Then often, I'd go back down into them the next day.”

This is what the fight to save the California condor had come down to in 1987—buried biologists waiting for the chance to leap up out of the ground and grab the last free-flying condor, ending an era that had lasted for at least ten million years.

Nobody in the condor program liked that image, and some ab
solutely loathed it. But the scientists who knew the condors best knew they'd run out of options. Something in the condor's habitat was poisoning the birds, and rumors that somebody was trying to kill them were all over the place. The scientists were warning that a reproductive emergency was at hand. Every last condor had to be caught and brought to zoos for captive breeding.

Bloom believed the arguments held moments of weakness. “I felt like the state executioner,” he told me once. “But I knew we were doing the right thing, so that's what I focused on.”

In 1987, Bloom didn't look like the kind of guy you'd want to leave your kids with: he was skinny to the point of scrawniness with wild brown hair and a beard, and strange-looking scars made by talons and beaks on his leathery face and hands. He had been raised about a hundred miles south in Orange County, California, where his father maintained helicopters at the local Marine base. When he was a kid, he started trapping red-tailed hawks near his house for the fun of it, and then he started fitting them with tags that helped researchers track their movements. Over the years he'd learned to trap all kinds of other raptors, using everything from cannon nets to wire mesh baited with mice. When Bloom joined the condor recovery team in the 1980s, he was known as one of the most accomplished and reliable trappers.

Packing for the pit traps was a ritual for Bloom. Into his black filthy briefcase always went one walkie-talkie; one set of binoculars; one small battery-operated ceiling fan; one bag of lunch with an extra-large water bottle; one piece of airtight Tupperware with a small roll of toilet paper inside; one lucky hunting knife; one dirty rug; and one 100-percent-cotton sleeping bag. Synthetic bags were out because they were too noisy. Coffee, deodorant, strong-smelling foods, and bug sprays were also forbidden, even though the condors weren't thought to have a strong sense of smell. “They
were avoiding us and we didn't know why,” said Bloom. “I wasn't taking any chances.”

The field crews dug at night when the condors were asleep. Usually it took a crew of six to build a trap from start to finish: three or four field biologists, one veterinarian, and one or two designated “master baiters,” so named because it was their job to bolt the carcasses of stillborn calves to the ground in front of the trap. This job usually involved driving out to a local dairy and then wading through knee-deep pools of manure and urine to get the carcass, which was then hosed down, cleaned up, and moved to a freezer close to the trap. “Road-kill deer went in the freezer, too, if they were big enough,” said Bloom. “The only thing we never used were the carcasses of animals shot and left behind by hunters.”

When the trench was finished, it was reinforced with four-by-fours and covered by an inch-thick sheet of plywood. The trapdoor Bloom climbed in and out of was at the front of the structure; in the middle was a head-size hole covered by an upside-down wicker basket that was porous enough to see out of. When Bloom went in, the basket and the plywood were covered with dirt and bits of vegetation—in the end, it looked like a bump in the pasture.

Scavenging birds of every shape and size were quickly drawn to the carcasses—ravens, turkey vultures, black vultures, and golden eagles. When Bloom heard the birds hit the ground, he'd check the wicker viewing basket for black widow spiders, often squashing one or two beneath one of his boots. Then he'd push his head up through the hole in the plywood and peek at the mayhem taking place five feet in front of him. Sometimes Bloom saw a half dozen golden eagles fight for choice chunks of meat while another half dozen stood back waiting for an opening. Once he saw an eagle dive at least three hundred feet into the back of another large bird, knocking it senseless and clear of the spot the eagle wanted on the carcass.

“Ravens sometimes parted the grass in front of the basket with their beaks,” said Bloom. “They would see my eyes looking at them, and back away like nothing had happened. I'm certain they knew I was there, they just couldn't believe it.”

He could have reached out and grabbed any number of golden eagles by the legs: he'd done it dozens of times while working other jobs. But condors were another matter.

“Very cautious birds,” he said. “Sometimes they'd fly over the carcass once and never come back, and other times they'd circle down and land on a dead branch near the top of a tree. They'd watch the other birds eat for hours and then turn around and leave. That's what usually happened.”

Bloom said it was easy to recognize the sound of an approaching condor: the whoosh that became a roar kept getting louder and louder until it ended with the thump of great big feet and the clatter of enormous wings. When the condors walked directly over the trap, Bloom could hear them breathing, their wheezing lungs sounding something like a winded child's. Looking through the basket at the carcass, he would see the smaller birds start flapping and scattering about, jumping out of the condor's path like peasants diving off the road at the approach of the king's carriage.

Condors were usually trapped by nets fired out of small cannons, but Bloom tried not to use them when he didn't have to. There was always the chance that one of the cannons would fall over and start a fire, or shoot too low and blow a hole in the bird. The guns might fail to fire all at once; plus, they required explosives. Finally, it was very hard to hide a cannon.

But the pits, if built properly, were undetectable, he said. From the air they blended in perfectly with the soil and the vegetation, and when the birds were on the ground, they did not notice the difference in terrain. “Eagles and condors on the ground look up and
around for danger all the time,” he said. “But they hardly ever look down for predators, and we used that to our advantage.”

The trapping had gone slowly and fitfully, but by the end of 1986, there were only two condors left in the wild. Bloom caught one of them, a bird known officially as AC-5, on February 27. He remembered looking up and seeing the silhouette of the last remaining wild California condor set against the clear blue sky. That bird was Igor.

 

David Brower ached to see the condors, but he did not want to track them down. They were creatures with a driving need to stay away from people, he had always said. People who handled them were biological thugs, in his opinion, “macho scientists” who sat around comparing their scars. To Brower, this was conservation science at its worst, if it was conservation at all.

“A condor is [only] five percent feathers, flesh, blood and bone,” he once wrote in an open letter. “The rest is
place.
Condors are a soaring manifestation of the place that built them and coded their genes. That place requires space to meet in, to teach fledglings to roost unmolested, to bathe and drink in, to find other condors in (and not biologists), and to fly over wild and free.”
¹

In 1987, this was the rhetoric that powered what was left of the “hands-off” school of condor conservation, which at one time had been endorsed by the state's most powerful and accomplished natural scientists.

But the number of condors left in the wild had fallen since the end of World War II, and drastic scientific interventions in their lives had become routine. Plans to trap the condors and breed them in captivity had now been endorsed by all the relevant government agencies and a panel of nationally known ornithologists and natural scientists.

But Brower would not be persuaded to endorse their method, and that gave people pause. He was one of the most important environmentalists in American history, famous for his hatred of compromise solutions, and this, in his view, was way past compromise. This was virtual extinction.

I called him in late 1986, while the trapping was under way: he spent the next fifteen minutes firing broadsides at the federal recovery program, using words and phrases I had heard him use before. The California Condor Recovery Program was a perfect example of how
not
to save a disappearing species: it was a high-risk experiment on a creature that deserved much better.

“To save it, the condor was destroyed,” said Brower on the phone. “The zoos have everything they wanted.”

Brower's confrontational style was one of the reasons he no longer worked for the Sierra Club, and it would soon be one of the reasons for his split with Friends of the Earth. But Brower's seething eloquence was his genius, too: early on it helped him define the modern American environmental movement.

Brower wrote the book on environmental land wars in the early 1950s, just after he became director of the Sierra Club. The Federal Bureau of Reclamation, long known in the West as an agency that could not be defeated, had just announced that it would raise a series of new dams in an astonishingly beautiful corner of the Colorado River Basin. Western cities and so-called recreationists loved the idea, but Brower hated it. Even before it was revealed that one of the dams would flood part of Utah's Dinosaur National Monument, he was preparing to fight it.

When the plan to flood a small part of the park was made public, Brower launched the land war that earned his place in history. To stop the dams, he organized ranchers and lawyers and hikers, who rarely spoke to each other, and hired Wallace Stegner, Utah's
answer to Shakespeare, to edit a picture book/anthology called
This Is Dinosaur
. He then commissioned a documentary that demonized the bureau by arguing that the dams could not be built safely.

Then he drew the whole country into the fight by buying a full-page ad in the
New York Times
. The ad declared that there was really only “one, simple, incredible issue here—this time it's the Grand Canyon they want to flood. The
GRAND CANYON
.” When the bureau tried to rally support from fishermen and water-skiers, Brower placed another full-page ad in the
Washington Post
: “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?”

The Sierra Club lost its tax-exempt status after these ads ran. But the bureau lost the war. Three of the proposed dams were not built, and it's all but certain that they never will be. According to the writer John McPhee in his
Encounters with the Archdruid
, these tactics set the gold standard for future environmental battles.

Those were the strategies Brower carried into the condor wars, which he viewed as a fight to save not only the condor but a crea
ture whose plight was symbolic of the threat to endangered species all over the world. “We can respect the dignity of a creature that has done our species no wrong,” he once wrote. “Except perhaps to prefer us at a distance.”

Brower often told reporters that his interest in condors dated to the early 1930s, when he was a daring and extremely accomplished rock climber. Then, in the 1940s, he met a man named Carl Koford at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California-Berkeley. Koford was finishing the study that defined the condor as a creature of the wild. Brower came away convinced that saving them meant saving wild places.

When Koford died of cancer in 1979, Brower became the alpha male of the hands-off movement. With the help of Dave Phillips, a colleague and close friend, Brower questioned every move the federal condor team made. Friends of the Earth, the group he then ran, put out a book called
The Condor Question: Captive or Forever Free?
and a documentary that showed a condor dying in the arms of a biologist.

However, when I called Brower in 1986, the battle had been lost. Lawsuits had failed to stop the trapping plans; calls to influential friends and federal officials had been ignored. The governing board of the Sierra Club had voted to support the “hands-on” approach, as had a panel of nationally prominent natural scientists. Phillips said he and Brower faced those facts near the end of 1986, while sitting in the darkened San Francisco office of Friends of the Earth. “We'd done everything we could do to stop the zoos and their friends, but it hadn't been enough. We knew the wild bird was gone,” Phillips recalled. “If we got a bird back from the zoos, we'd get a tamed-down version of the condor—a bird that had been trained to fly back and forth inside a grid.”