Condor (26 page)

There was only one point on which everybody in the room
agreed. If Igor did go home, he'd find it hard to lose those pesky human trackers. Field crews in the Sespe had just finished testing a tracking system built around a thirty-five-gram satellite transmitter, which had been attached to the right wing of the Matriarch. She was still attached to a set of old-fashioned transmitters, but the satellite beeper had been putting it to shame. Condors wearing the satellite transmitters never flew out of tracking range; anytime anybody wanted to know where a satellite bird had been, all they had to do was turn on the computer and download the latest tracking map. The bird with the thirty-five-gram device would appear as a blip at the end of a line that looked like it belonged on an Etch-A-Sketch: it would be a record of every flight the bird had made. In the past, the only way to make these maps was to trap the birds and download the data from their transmitters; this was a change that seemed to make it safer
and
easier to study the tagged birds. But as anyone who's ever worked with condors understands, these birds always zig just when you think they're going to zag.

 

Mike Clark, the condor keeper at the Los Angeles Zoo, carried a portable dog kennel into Igor's pen on the morning of February 4,2002. Not long afterward, a helicopter carried Clark and his cargo past the San Fernando Valley and the south edge of Topa Topa Mountain, touching down near the edge of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Clark hopped out and carried Igor's kennel into a wood-and-wire holding pen. Three young condors raised in zoos were already there. At first the zoo-breds kept their distance from Igor, knowing he would show them who was boss. By the end of the day, they were following him and trying to copy his movements.

Two weeks later, the four condors were moved to a larger pen in a valley in the Hopper Mountain Refuge. Field biologists and vol
unteers grabbed the birds, bolting on the ID tags and radio transmitters. When they finished, Igor was pumped.

“He was flying all around the pen,” said a volunteer named Anthony Pietro. “Then he was up at the top of the pen, holding on to it with his beak. For a minute we thought he was going to break his beak. He was totally going berserk.”

Just before dawn on the following morning, the birds were moved to a release pen on the lip of a cliff in the center of the sanctuary. Through a wire door on the front of the pen the birds looked across a canyon at Koford's O.P., one of the wildest places left on Earth. They saw the hills cracked open by the earthquakes and the washes carved by prehistoric floods. Much of the chaparral had never been cut and never would be.

Then there were the cliffs and the caves. This was a landscape defined by cliffs of almost every shape and size, and by an even wider range of caves. Some were huge and easy to reach. Others were slits in polished walls. There were caves whose walls were lined with whitewash sprayed by long-dead condors, and caves that had never been used. Counting them was out of the question, I thought. It would be like counting the stars.

Tony Pietro was watching the birds through a peephole in the back of the release pen. Now it was the zoo-breds that were skittering around and gnawing at the inside of the pen; Igor had walked straight from his kennel to the wire mesh door that opened out onto the Sespe and stood there surveying the landscape. “He looked to his left, to his right, up, down—he was totally recognizing it,” Pietro said. “I'm not a scientist, but it was like, ‘Hey, I remember this place.'”

Igor would have seen the crowds of people gathering on a distant escarpment, just below Koford's O.P. Chumash dancers, ranchers and activists, field biologists and breeders, yet no one from the
Peregrine Fund. Someday they will have to explain what they were doing on the day Igor finally came home. The California field crews took their absence as an insult, as did I.

The man Igor would have seen at the outer edge of the escarpment was geneticist Oliver Ryder of the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species at the San Diego Zoo. He'd never been to the Sespe, and the only condor he'd ever seen outside a zoo was the one perched on the roof of a house. The big guy was Bruce Palmer, the director of the condor recovery team; the people crowding around him were reporters. The Chumash dancers were moving in circles near the point of the escarpment, chanting songs the condor could not hear.

A smaller group had gathered at the top of a rise near the other end of the escarpment. The short guy with the beard was Jon Schmitt. I was standing next to him. Next to me was Pete Bloom, staring through his sighting scope at the front of the release pen and mumbling under his breath. I never had a chance to ask him what he was saying but I think I can guess: Bloom was probably talking to his bird.

The door on the front of the release pen was opened by an unseen hand at 11
A.M
. on May 1, 2002. The condors hatched and reared in zoos hopped out right away and flew down to a ledge. But Igor would not leave the doorway. He was still standing in the shadows of the pen when I left the area. Late that afternoon an impatient biologist entered the release pen and nudged Igor out into the world.

 

The condor known as the Matriarch, Igor's mate in the early 1980s when they were among the last free-flying condors on Earth, was shot and killed on February 13, 2003. The Matriarch was roughly forty when she died. She'd been released in the wild several years before, in the hope that she would teach the misbehaving
zoo-breds to act like wild condors. At first she had refused to do any such thing, avoiding the other birds and shooing them away when they came around. The satellite readings showed that she was following her old flight paths to familiar foraging grounds, some of which had lost their carcasses forever in the fourteen years the Matriarch had been away. But in time she'd become a mentor to the younger birds, soaring in their company and showing them her roosts. Trappers had been forced to take her in fall 2000 when blood tests showed that she had a potentially lethal amount of lead in her veins and arteries. When the lead was removed and the bird was re-released in December 2000, you could almost hear the field crews and keepers breathe a sigh of relief.

When Igor was moved to a holding pen in the Sespe just before he was released, the Matriarch had landed on the roof and pulled at the mesh above her old breeding partner. Now, nearly a year later, she was a twisted carcass wedged between a pair of branches near the top of a thirty-foot oak tree on the Tejon Ranch, forty-five minutes north of Hopper Mountain Refuge. A single bullet had passed through her torso and then through her left wing.

Nobody admitted to the crime. Then investigators stood the carcass up on the perch where she'd been killed, tracing the path of the bullet back to where the shooter had likely stood. There they found a rifle shell that led police to the home of a twenty-nine-year-old man who denied firing the shot, even though he had been hunting pigs on the Tejon Ranch that day. After meeting with his lawyer, Britton Cole Lewis changed his mind and admitted that he'd shot the Matriarch. But Lewis swore he didn't know the giant black bird in the oak tree was a California condor. Lewis lived in a town where local hunters would have known that turkey vultures don't have ten-foot wingspans, and the Tejon Ranch says it makes a point of telling visitors not to shoot the giant vultures.

Condor biologists had trouble buying Lewis's story, but federal prosecutors apparently did not. Instead of charging him with a felony violation of the U.S. Endangered Species Act, they accused Lewis of violating the much less powerful Migratory Bird Treaty Act. ESA convictions can mean more jail time and much heavier fines, but they're hard to obtain when prosecutors can't prove the killings were intentional: in other words, when hunters caught dead to rights want to neutralize the ESA, all they have to do is say they pulled the trigger before they knew what they were killing.

Lewis was sentenced to sixty hours probation, a five-thousand-dollar fine, and two hundred hours of community service. At the sentencing he said he was sorry and wished he could take back what he'd done.

 

The last time I saw Igor he was soaring near my old hometown of Piru, at the base of the Topa Topa mountain range in south-central California. I saw him circling slowly around a rising column of wind in the middle of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. When he reached the top of it, he seemed to pause and scan the wildlands below him. Then he flexed his wings and veered off to the south, toward the smog.

S
ophie Osborne pulled the garbage can with the carcass of the stillborn calf inside it out of the back of the pickup truck she'd parked near the edge of the Vermilion Cliffs. The can had a pair of shoulder straps attached to the side of it; Osborne grabbed them and swung the can up onto her back. Then she hustled off across a red plateau strewn with ankle-breaking rocks. From behind, it looked a bit like she was skipping.

Osborne is the Peregrine Fund biologist who took Shawn Farry's place in the field, when he quit his job to work with Mike Wallace at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and then quit that job to work with monk seals in the South Pacific. Early in 2001, the first recorded California condor egg was produced in the wild since the last of the free-flying birds were trapped in the 1980s. It was a milestone the recovery team had been praying for since the released zoo-breds had gotten old enough to breed in the wild.

“I noticed that the pair of condors had stopped flying together and settled into a cave,” she said. “When one was foraging the other always stayed behind in the cave. When the foraging bird came
back to the cave, its mate would fly away. When they alternate like that, it usually means they're guarding an egg.”

Osborne began trembling when it dawned on her that she was almost certainly looking at an active condor nest site. News of the event shot through the recovery team like an electric power surge. Then the parent birds appeared to kill the egg. Osborne saw the parent condors fighting near the entrance to the cave one afternoon. One of them went inside and came back out a short time later with the egg impaled on its beak.

One year later, an Arizona breeding pair laid an egg in a cave inside the colossal rock formation called the Battleship in the heart of the Grand Canyon, while at least two other condor eggs were laid in California. A chick emerged from one of the eggs produced in California, but it died before it was old enough to fly. Spokesmen for the program said that they hadn't expected the eggs to produce a fledgling, given that first attempts like these rarely added up to much.

So when Osborne and raptor expert Chad Olsen of the U.S. Park Service found another active nest cave the next year, they tried to keep their hopes in check. “The egg was in a part of the canyon called the Inferno,” Osborne said. “It's a narrow drainage near Hopi Point with incredible red rock walls, and the nest was at the point of the drainage.”

Osborne and Olsen hiked down into the Inferno in August of that year. When they got close enough, they set up a sighting scope and looked into the mouth of the cave.

“It was too dark in there to see very much, but Chad thought something was moving. Then he said something like ‘Oh my God,' and we saw a very big baby condor come out of the darkness.” Osborne said they sat in the Inferno and watched the chick for two more days, sometimes feeling totally cut off from the rest of world
and sometimes hearing the voices of the unseen crowds of tourists gathered on the distant observation points.

Out in California, three condor chicks were seen that year. Two died quickly. The third chick appeared to thrive for months, raising hopes that it would fledge. Then, unexpectedly, it started shedding its tail and secondary feathers. The bird was taken out of the cave and flown to the Los Angeles Zoo, but by the time it arrived it was too late. Veterinarians euthanized the chick on September 14. Necropsy results revealed an irreversible lung disease and a hole in the gastrointestinal tract. Wedged into the condor's crop were the pop-tops of three aluminum cans, shards of glass and plastic, and an eighteen-inch-long rag soaked in oil. Critics of the program said the necropsy helped prove that California was no longer safe for condors. Noel Snyder renewed his call for a broad review of the program by a panel of ornithologists with no connection to the program.

“This is why we took the wild condors to the zoos in the first place,” Snyder said. “Putting them back into the same environment doesn't make any sense. If we don't reduce the lead threat in particular we'll always have a feeding-station population of condors, and nobody I know wants that.”

Osborne and Olsen hiked back into the Inferno in the fall to check up on the lone remaining wild chick, which was now equipped with giant wings it didn't know how to use. “For a while it would have these activity bouts where it would flap its wings madly and run around inside the cave. Then it gave us heart attacks by coming out onto the ledge so it was facing the cliff face and beating its wings against the rocks.” The ledge was very narrow and the cave was roughly six hundred feet above the ground.

After that, for a couple of days, the condor barely moved. Osborne and Olsen worried more. On November 5, it had another burst of
energy, jumping up and down while seeming to look in fifty directions at once. Then, after seeming to calm down, it jumped off the ledge and fell, spinning and tumbling in a way that reminded Osborne of a maple leaf.

“I don't know if it had something in mind and overestimated its ability, but it was falling and our hearts were in our throats. The wings were partially extended and the bird was trying to right itself, but the most it could manage was a kind of controlled plummet.” After falling about two hundred feet, the condor briefly disappeared behind a wall of rock that was jutting out of the side of the cliff; then it tumbled back into view, still out of control, with about four hundred feet to go before it would crash into the bottom of the canyon.

Somewhere in that last four hundred feet the condor learned to fly. Not well, but well enough. “It was a surprisingly gentle landing,” Osborne said. “He stood there looking kind of shell-shocked for a minute or two. Then he started walking toward the nest cave.”