Condor (21 page)

Ryder and a colleague made those arguments matter when they found a way to draw the missing family trees. The condor project needed this breakthrough; when it was done, the future of the
species seemed a little brighter than it had before. According to the bar codes, the last surviving condors hadn't bred much with cousins, siblings, parents, or close relatives, and this raised the odds that the condor genome was in pretty good shape. It probably wasn't full of recessive genes that worked like hidden time bombs set to blow up somewhere down the line, triggering killer diseases and severe deformities.

“The birds fell into three distinct genetic clans,” said Ryder. “This was a good thing. One of the clans held the condors we already knew were related, and this was also good. Topa Topa and AC-9 were in one of the other clans. They were from the same family, which was cool.”

“So, it's possible to argue that this was a turning point in the history of conservation biology for biologists, right?”

“I'm fond of saying there's a dividing line in the history of biology,” he said, ducking the question, “with the pregenomics era on one side and the postgenomics era on the other. In 1987, we were stepping across the line, into a world where everything was going to be seen through the lens of genome biology. And that's exactly what happened. Everywhere you look, there are new tools, new technologies, new and wonderful opportunities. The problem is that when you look at the objects of your concern—species diversity, deeper gene pools, that kind of thing—all you see are trend lines pointing down toward extinction. We want to use the encouraging curve to affect the depressing one.”

The condor work proved it could be done.

 

Meanwhile, back at the sanctuary, Lloyd Kiff and Robert Mesta were revising the Condor Recovery plan and guarding the habitat. Twenty-two days after Igor's capture, the Forest Service decided to review the status of 383,867 acres of lands withdrawn from leasing
and mining operations to protect the California condor, raising the possibility that much of this land, including the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, would be reopened to mining companies, timber companies, home builders, road builders, motocross riders, and others. Kiff and Mesta were doing what they could to keep the lands withdrawn, but George Bush Senior's White House was extremely sympathetic to the needs of the extractive industries, and the state of California didn't seem interested in getting in the president's way. In 1986, a spokesman for the Department of the Interior had wondered aloud about whether the condor program had become a biological “lost cause” and a financial “black hole.” The overall bill for the condor program had just reached $20 million, and a lot of people thought that was too much.

One of the loudest critics of the program was Bil Gilbert, a well-known nature writer who'd been following the effort to save the bird for many years. In an article he wrote in 1986 for
Discover
magazine, Gilbert announced that he'd had enough of the endlessly melodramatic fight to save not one but “two of the most insignificant of animals” from almost certain extinction. The animals in question, Gilbert wrote, were the black-footed ferret and the condor. “The condor has become a kind of Charles and Di story,” he added, “what with breathless bulletins about little buster's hatching at the San Diego Zoo, that adjunct of the Johnny Carson show.”

The point of the article was in the headline itself:
WHY DON'T WE PULL THE PLUG ON THE CONDOR AND FERRET
? In the piece, Gilbert argued that “in the strictly zoological context” it was hard to justify spending a cent on “gaudy crisis patients” that had nothing to do with the natural world around them. Gilbert seemed to think that this was a fate far worse than mere extinction; “managed” species bred in captivity weren't worth saving, he implied. “Even if all goes very well, we will, in fact, have produced these animals as we
produce poodles, and we will manage them like domestic stock.”
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So why not spend the next $20 million on ecologically important mountaintops, or prize wetlands full of rare animals and plants? Why waste all that money on losers like the ferret and the condor? Gilbert planned to write something mournful when the ferret and the vulture were gone, even though that “might not be such a terrible thing as is commonly, reflexively thought”:

As the leader of a team of scientists created to advise the condor field crews, Lloyd Kiff was always sending letters to the editors of magazines that printed stories about the condor. After reading Bil Gilbert's “Pull the Plug” article, he felt like firing off a long one, in which he would have pointed out the following:

1. The condor program spends a lot of money buying property important to the future of the species.
   
2. Politically, there's no chance that money taken from the effort to save condors would be used to save lesser-known species.
   
3. The condor population in the zoos is getting bigger as more eggs are laid; someday soon, if all goes well, birds hatched and reared in captivity will be released in Southern California.
   
4. When you save a big chunk of habitat for the California condor, you save it for hundreds of smaller species at the same time.
   

But Kiff was way too busy to write letters like those, at least until he finished revising the official condor recovery plan. A plan can't be accepted as official until everyone involved in the process signs off on it, and then waits for everyone else to sign before reading the plan again. If the person busy rereading the plan finds important language that wasn't in the plan the first time around, he or she can take the offensive language out and start the process over.

Kiff had signed off on the recovery plan after taking out a paragraph that would have made it easier for the owners of a former land grant on the far side of the mountains to build suburban homes in an important corner of the condor's feeding range. After Igor's capture, lawyers representing the Tejon Ranch began to argue that the condor had become “technically extinct” when the last bird left the wild; the lawyers also argued that because the Endangered Species Act did not protect the habitats of extinct species, then it couldn't be used to protect the habitats of “technically extinct” creatures.
³

These claims had never been tested in court, but Kiff had a feeling they were related to an onerous paragraph he kept removing from the new version of the condor recovery plan, only to see that it had been restored when he read the plan for what was supposed to be the final time.

The paragraph would have exempted the owners of the sprawling Tejon Ranch from all land-use rules designed to protect the condor and its range. “Every time I found it I'd cross it out and send it back” to the Ventura office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he said. “They would send it off to Washington for a final re
view, and when it returned, the paragraph would be back in it. I don't how many times I killed it before Washington finally gave up,” Kiff said. “It was like trying to stomp on a cockroach.”

In 1989, these gathering land-use fights were postponed by a controversial experiment. Over the objections of a number of ornithologists and activists, female Andean condors raised in zoos were released in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Lloyd Kiff called it a “practice run” designed to help the field crews prepare themselves for the day when the Andeans would be replaced by zoo-bred California condors. The critics called it “foolish and counterproductive,” warning that it might end up delaying the return of the California birds, and adding that Andean condors, unlike their distant cousins, occasionally ate from the carcasses of animals they'd killed themselves. Rumors that the Andeans would never be removed began to circulate, along with talk that the California birds would be moved to the Grand Canyon.
⁴

Seven Andean nestlings were released in 1989; six more followed in 1990. Five were captured and then rereleased after badly fastened radio transmitters tore up the edges of their wings; one was removed because it never quite learned to fly; and one was electrocuted when it crashed into a power line.

Then, with one exception, the other birds began to see the wind, staying out of trouble while gradually expanding their range. The last of the Andeans to fail had a thing for hang gliders. More than once, shocked pilots turned their heads to see a vulture with a ten-foot wingspan pull up next to them, touch the wing of the glider with the tip of a primary feather, and fly at the same exact speed for a couple of minutes, all the while staring into the eyes of the human with the nylon wings. By the time the experiment was over, the remaining Andeans were flying through the mountains in eastern Santa Barbara County on a fairly regular basis, and one traveled
ninety miles east to Riverside County. The field biologists were pleased to see the Andeans eat almost exclusively from “clean” carcasses laid out for them; they weren't so pleased when big black bears stole the carcasses in the night.

I saw the Andeans in the Sespe in 1990. Dave Clendenen, then the federal government's senior condor biologist in the sanctuary, led me to a plywood observation blind near the place called Koford's O.P. I was looking out across a dry wash when I started hearing beeping noises coming out of the tracking gear. Clendenen tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up at the opening in the top of the blind, where two Andeans floated a hundred feet above our heads.

“You've been busted,” said Clendenen, stating the obvious. Shortly afterward, the condors swirled up and over to the south, toward the smog.

 

Early April, 1988: Don Sterner and the other keepers sat in the captive breeding center, staring at the closed-circuit monitor connected to the camera in UN-1's pen. The condor was sitting in the corner of the pen doing nothing of significance, but all eyes remained on the screen. UN-1 was the first of the female Californians to copulate that year, and lately she'd been moving lugubriously around the pen. If this bird was pregnant, this was probably her due date, since it was about five months since she had mated with a condor known as AC-4. For that reason, every time it looked as if UN-1 was about to move, all the keepers watching the monitors leaned forward and held their breath.
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“We're all wondering whether she's sitting on an egg,” Sterner said, “but none of us can see one. We're waiting and waiting in front of these monitors and no one is saying a word, and the atmo
sphere in there was so incredibly tense I couldn't believe it, and then she moved.”

UN-1 stood halfway up and sat back down again, readjusting her weight. Everybody saw the egg flash white beneath her. For a moment, the walls of the trailer shook with the cheering of the keepers; then AC-4 climbed up into the nest box. “I said, ‘Okay, everybody, let's go get that egg,' and we rushed over to the pen,” Sterner added. “We netted the birds and put the egg in a bucket of warm finch seed and delicately carried it back to the incubation chambers and then we took one of those green kitchen sponge pads and sanded off the stuff that was stuck to the outer part of the shell and looked for cracks.”

No cracks. Sterner held the ten-ounce condor egg over a bright light called a candler and stared at the yellow-orange glow. “Everything inside looked fine,” he said. Seconds later, he put the egg down on a padded shelf in the middle of a boxy wooden incubator—98 degrees, adjustable humidity, backup power supply—and called Art Risser, the zoo's curator of birds. More jumping and cheering.

Sterner and the other keepers checked the egg every day after that, rocking it back and forth on its longitudinal axis to distribute the heat from the candle, tracing the growth of the air sac with a soft lead pencil that was never pointed straight at the shell, adjusting the humidity of the incubator to speed up or slow down the rate at which water in the egg was evaporating through the shell, and looking for the bump on the surface of the yolk that is the first sign of cell division. When Sterner saw the bump, he picked up his walkie-talkie and made a short announcement to the staff at the park: “ATTENTION ANIMAL SCIENCES UNITS, THE CONDOR EGG IS FERTILE.” People called him back to yell and scream.

This was the first fertile California condor egg ever laid in a cap
tive setting. Brief accounts of the grand event appeared in papers around the world. Tape recordings of vulture grunts and hissing sounds were played nonstop in the incubation room for the next several weeks. On April 26, a tiny hole called a “pip mark” appeared in the side of the egg. More stories ran as the chick started hatching. Then the chick got stuck.

“We dressed up in our surgical gear and went back in with nervous hands,” Sterner said, “knowing that the world would be out there waiting while we broke this little guy out.”

This is called “assisted hatching,” and it doesn't always work. Sterner and biologist Cindy Kuehler took turns chipping at tiny fragments of eggshell, trying hard to stay away from parts of the membrane that could rupture and kill the chick. When they were sure the membrane was safe, they broke off slightly bigger bits of egg with their gloved fingers and a set of tweezers. “Steady gentle pressure is the key,” said Sterner. “Condor shells are kind of thick.”

Sixty-one hours after the pip appeared, at 5:38
P.M
. on April 29, 1988, Sterner poured a 6.5-ounce condor chick named Molloko out of a meticulously disassembled egg into Kuehler's hands. “The little legs were really kicking hard,” he said. “When we were done we took a group photo and went to a big press conference. Then we drank a lot of wine.”