Condor (19 page)

“We'd called it ‘living on condor time,'” said biologist Helen Snyder. “If you wait long enough, you grow invisible to the world around you.”

The California Condor Recovery team did a huge amount of living on condor time in the early 1980s after the chick died in the arms of Bill Lehman. If the team had kept its trapping permits, Noel and Helen Snyder might not have been the first to see a condor egg hatch in the wild, or the first to see a raven slurp the yolk out of a condor egg it had just punctured with its beak. Most important, they might have missed the chance to be the first to see a pair of condors make two eggs in one breeding season, laying the second after the first was accidentally lost. Ornithologists call this process “double clutching,” but they weren't sure the condors did it. Noel Snyder said he felt euphoric when it happened.
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“It proved that we could take a set of eggs to the zoo without making the wild flock smaller,” he said. “It meant we had a chance to double the number of condors hatched each year. Of course we were even more amazed when we started seeing triple clutching. That happened several times.”

Snyder's other breakthrough came when he figured out how to tell the condors apart. This was supposed to be impossible to do from a distance, he said. This was true because male and female
condors have the same markings, and because the birds don't vary all that much in size. It also explained why previous attempts to count the birds had produced such different results—if a condor flies out of sight and then back again, how does an observer know it's not two different birds? Trapping and marking every last condor left was one solution, but at the moment, that was not allowed.

Snyder said the answer came to him when ornithologist Eric Johnson of California Polytechnical State University at San Luis Obispo brought a group of students up into the mountains to photograph the birds. When he saw their pictures, he noticed that some birds had broken feathers on their wings; others had feathers that were merely bent or molting. If someone were to organize a mass photography session in the condor's rangelands, those photographs could be studied and sorted into piles, one pile per bird. If Snyder were to count the piles he would know how many birds were left. If there were a lot of them, captive breeding programs wouldn't seem quite so essential. If there were only a few, it would be the other way around.

Snyder and Johnson started handing out cameras to every reliable observer they knew. Not long afterward, towering stacks of condor pictures filled Snyder's office. Some of the pictures showed birds with telltale scars on their heads. All the other clues were in the wings. Photographs taken in the course of a day were laid out on a map drawn on the floor of Snyder's office, so that Snyder and Johnson could trace the flight paths of individual birds. After several weeks of sorting, the two men concluded that as of the summer of 1982, there were no more than twenty-four and no fewer than twenty-one California condors left on Earth.

The fact that the birds had finally been counted was what Snyder called the good news. The count itself confirmed his fears. When
Snyder staged a second count in 1983, the total was even more depressing: that time he ended up with twenty-two piles of photographs. “These data…indicate a continuing catastrophic decline of the species,” he and Eric Johnson later wrote. “In the absence of intense conservation measures, extinction of the wild population can be expected in 10–20 years.”

While the photographic census was under way, the field teams kept on watching the birds, which was not an easy thing to do. “Everybody burned out eventually, but some people seemed to have a gift,” said Helen Snyder. “Some people could sit and watch nonstop for weeks, and some went nuts after just a few days. Most people lasted about five days before they started missing things. After that it turned into, ‘Gee I'd like a beer,' or, ‘I wonder what my girlfriend is doing,' or, ‘I could be in Santa Barbara right now.'”

One researcher never seemed to want to leave his home in the wild. He was Jon Schmitt, a line artist, careful note-taker, and accomplished taxidermist. “Jon would sit there all day every day for a month at a time,” said Helen Snyder. “And none of his field notes ever missed a beat. I don't know how he did it, but it never seemed to bother him. He's the guy who saw the golden eagle try to kill the chick at the entrance to the cave.”

Schmitt told me he'd be happy to describe the attack once he reviewed his field notes. He didn't want to mix it up with any of the dozens of other condor-eagle episodes he'd seen while sitting in the blinds. Some of these encounters were halfhearted eagle attacks designed to push condors out of choice thermals. Other attacks were so relentless and aggressive that they ended with the condor lying on the ground or hiding in a cave.

Schmitt said he knew there was an eagle on the way when he saw descending condors looking backward over their shoulders. Anything below a diving golden eagle is in trouble, but Schmitt said the
condors had their defenses up. Once he watched a condor fleeing from an eagle that was shooting down out of the clouds, gradually increasing its angle of descent. “By the time the eagle and the condor were in the same optical field of view they were falling almost vertically,” he said. “Both had their wings drawn close in and their flight feathers were swept back.”

Schmitt heard “a loud shrill tearing sound” as the birds shot past, even though they were three hundred yards away. “The condor is falling hard and fast, but the eagle is so much faster. It closes the distance swiftly, and just when I thought contact had been made, the condor deftly rolls over, briefly flying upside down.” The anchor-shaped eagle sheared harmlessly past the suddenly inverted vulture; almost instantly, it vaulted up, “like it had bounced off of some kind of invisible surface.” Golden eagles like to stay above their prey, and this one wasn't taking any chances. Schmitt said it rose almost vertically, several hundred feet up into the air in a matter of seconds.

The eagle thought the condor would attempt to keep pace, but by then the condor was gone. Schmitt said he saw it blasting forward just above the ground, entering a forest of fir trees that tapered out near a popular roost site. Schmitt couldn't see the roost site, but he figured that that's where the condor ended up. Even golden eagles are hard-pressed to cope with several condors at once. The eagle flew over the horizon toward the roost site, Schmitt said, but a few minutes later it flew away, chased by heckling ravens.

Eagles also tried to get at fledglings. Schmitt saw this on two occasions, one of which began when a golden eagle dove on a squirrel that managed to escape. Schmitt was in a blind about a quarter-mile off, looking at the back of the eagle, when he saw it lean horizontally forward with its wings pressed slightly outward. “It was weaving its
head from side to side, triangulating the distance to its next intended victim. I was looking over the eagle's shoulder at a helpless condor chick, which for some imbecilic reason had chosen this moment to walk out to the front of a cave on the far side of a gorge.” The eagle took off and headed straight for the chick, which never seemed to see it coming. But at the last second, the eagle was knocked off course by a dive-bombing parent condor.

Schmitt was in the same blind when an eagle crashed down into a condor that was feeding a chick. He said the chick bounced into the cave while the adult turned around to face the eagle, which was lying on its back with its talons pointed up into the air. “Wings flailing and audibly slapping and scraping rock, the condor is standing on the eagle, furiously tearing at the eagle's breast and throwing clumps of feathers to the side; the eagle is ripping at the condor with its long legs and huge talons.” When the eagle broke free and attacked again, the birds pushed each other off the cliff. Both took flight before hitting the ground. Schmitt said the eagle flew away.

Everyone on the field staff had stories to tell. Some had found Indian burial sites. Some had discovered very old guns. Many saw fighter jets from Vandenberg Air Force Base chasing low-flying missiles up the canyons. “Nonflapping entities” were not supposed to drop lower than three thousand feet above the Sespe, but that rule was frequently ignored.

The speed with which the missiles and the planes roared through appeared to freak the condors out, as did the sonic booms they left behind as calling cards. Condor watchers saw the birds leap up off their eggs when they heard these booms. Every now and then a soaring condor would be rocked by the winds bouncing off a passing fighter.

Snyder and his team were out in force when a space shuttle passed through the refuge on its way to Edwards Air Force Base on July 4, 1982. The boom that trailed those rockets made the roar of
the missiles and the fighter planes sound like a mild summer breeze. Snyder said his colleagues saw a parent bird explode out of a nest cave as the shuttle passed, rushing forward in a way that made it look a little like a giant feathered cannonball.

Snyder and Ogden requested that the Navy ask its pilots to fly higher. They also urged NASA to bring their space shuttles down in Florida when the condors were tending to their eggs. To prove the need for these actions, Snyder and Ogden sent a package of photographs. One of them was taken just before an unarmed cruise missile crashed into the ground near the condor's breeding grounds; Jon Schmitt was the one who saw it happen. He'd learned to identify different kinds of missiles when he saw one waver and angle down in the spring of 1983. “I saw a puff of smoke before it fell into a canyon,” Schmitt said. “At that point it was out of sight.” Schmitt said the escort jets sailed forward over the tops of the mountains before turning back toward the canyon adjacent to the one that held the wreckage. Apparently unaware that they were looking in the wrong place, the fighter jets circled briefly and then left the area. Schmitt said he called the Forest Service on his walkie-talkie then, asking them to tell the Air Force where the missile was. A few minutes later the Forest Service passed a pair of messages back: First, the Air Force was aware of an “incident” that may or may not have involved a missile. Second, it did not need his help.

Shortly after that, a huge black military helicopter thundered forward, buzzing what may have been an occupied nest cave on its way up the wrong valley. Schmitt called the Forest Service a second time, asking that his message again be relayed to the Air Force. The Forest Service passed back a less polite version of the last set of messages. The helicopter looked around and flew away. Later, the Forest Service called back to ask Schmitt to repeat his earlier direc
tions. The military helicopter came back the next day to remove the wreckage of the drone.

By the time Schmitt saw the crash of the cruise missile, the contingency team had its trapping permits back. Snyder's team was taking eggs from breeding pairs and giving them to the zoos. Ogden's team was laying out carcasses and chasing after condors that had radio tracking devices bolted to their wings. Snyder himself was following the tagged birds around in an airplane, picking up data points that he described as “nothing short of spectacular.” Ogden said he watched the condors shadowing cattle herds during the calving season and then doing the same to deer hunters for the hunting season. He saw them soar on unseen winds for hundreds of miles at a time. He saw them stay away from logging operations on specific peaks, and noticed that some of the most traveled routes crossed mostly private land.

Ogden and Snyder were now fighting on a more or less constant basis. By some accounts they fought over control of the program, but by others they just didn't get along. The precedent-setting partnership between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Audubon Society was splitting into warring factions, with Ogden and the radio trackers on one side and Snyder and the field teams on the other. The split became a literal one when Snyder started running his half of the recovery team out of his home in Ojai, all but abandoning the Ventura office space he shared with Ogden.

For a time the only thing that kept these fights in check was the crushing load of fieldwork being done by each of the field teams. Ogden's crew was busy dragging carcasses around and chasing after condors wearing radio tags. Snyder's half worked so ridiculously hard out in the field that it's a wonder they're all still alive.

They called themselves “the zombie patrol,” because that's what
they often looked like when they staggered toward the condor nest caves—filthy, smelly, bleeding, starving, stiff, and utterly exhausted. Noel Snyder marched in the front of his group, carrying a pair of antiseptic gloves and a black padded suitcase that seemed to double as a good luck talisman: in the 1960s, other field biologists had used this case to carry whooping crane eggs off to captive breeding centers. Since condor eggs were roughly the same size as crane eggs, Snyder had the case sent to him when the permits came through that allowed him to take condor eggs. “It had thermometers sticking out of the top so we could make sure the eggs were warm enough,” he said. “We were out there carrying this suitcase through the brush, which must have looked very strange.”

Snyder was allowed to bring the lucky black suitcase out again in 1982, after he watched that pair of condors double-clutch to produce a second egg. Late in the summer of 1983, the field teams staked out every active nest they knew about. When the breeders laid their first set of eggs, the zombie patrol moved in, fording raging rivers, climbing vertical cliffs, cutting trails with chain saws, and clearing helipads in the middle of the night.

As soon as the team had the staging area all set up, Snyder and the pickup crew would climb up to the nest cave. When they got there, one of the researchers would tell a long, sick joke, in hopes that the sound of a human voice would lure the condors off the eggs and out of the caves. The joke was always told in a low voice, so as not to startle the birds: panicked condors might have crushed an egg on the way out.