Condor (23 page)

“The blind isn't insulated, and when the little window in the front is open, the wind and snow blast right through and smash you in the face,” he recalled. “I'm sitting in my sleeping bag, wearing four or five layers of clothing. I've got a small propane heater—it doesn't do any good unless I take my feet out of the sleeping bag. The birds are a hundred meters ahead of me, out on the edge of the cliff, but the snow is heavy and I'm having trouble seeing them. Their legs look way too gray to me, and I'm worried they might have frostbite, but I could be wrong. I put my head on the bottom of the blind so I can look through some cracks in the wood and see the feet a little better. Maybe the legs are only white from condor shit.”

From 1997 until the start of 2002, Farry was the lead biologist for the Arizona reintroduction program. He'd never worked with condors before, but he'd read a lot about them when he was a kid growing up in upstate New York. He said he was depressed for weeks when Pete Bloom caught the last of the free-flying condors in California in 1987. He said he was intimidated the first time he saw a condor, at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

“It was like you didn't want to look them directly in the eye,” said Farry. “Like you were supposed to look at the ground instead. The next thing I know I'm sitting in this blind on this cliff in a snowstorm, with the fate of the Arizona program in my hands.”

Local ranchers thought he was crazy. But gradually he'd won them over. They had watched him drag the carcasses of stillborn calves for miles over the rocks, just in case the condors needed something fresh to eat. The ranchers had invited him into their homes, eating Sunday meals. They knew he was going to keep these birds alive or die trying, and that had earned him some respect.

But Farry and the condors still had enemies. He and his colleagues still changed the subject when strangers asked them what they did for a living. They still had to stand there and take it every now and then when a gas station attendant or a bartender launched into a tirade against endangered species.

They also got some nasty hate mail. Farry read some of it while he was sitting in the blind, waiting for the storms to clear. “Meet your worst nightmare,” one missive said.

That was the worst of a long series of e-mails written by a man who had helped an injured friend hike out of a campsite at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. While he and the friend were making their way up and out of the canyon, a group of condors had found the site and ripped it to pieces. Farry's crew found the wreckage, cleaned up the campsite, and started packing the detritus out of the canyon. On the trail, they met the man who had just helped his injured friend hike out. Farry said the guy went ballistic.

“He wanted to be covered for the damage,” Farry said. “But the Fish and Wildlife Service couldn't do that. Campers in the canyon are supposed to know that they can't leave their gear out in the open, and if they have to do it, they are taking their chances. If we paid this guy, we'd end up paying all kinds of people, and that wasn't going to work. Do you pay a guy who gets bit by an ant and
goes into shock? Do you pay a guy when a passing bird craps on his car? It would never end.”

New groups of condors were released on a regular basis, and soon there were dozens of condors soaring over the area. With the help of five colleagues, Farry worked insanely hard to keep the birds alive. Each bird had a pair of transmitters on its wings, and Farry and his coworkers were expected to follow the birds' movements twenty-four hours a day. When a condor ate something that hadn't been laid out for it, Farry was supposed to backtrack and find out what the carcass was. When a condor buzzed a crowd on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Farry was supposed to catch the bird, or chase it away. He wore out a series of pickup trucks chasing the six birds around. When a bird was injured, he tracked it down, and put it in a kennel, and drove the kennel to the office of a friendly veterinarian in Page, Arizona.
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“You want surreal? Here's surreal,” Farry said. “I'm sitting in the waiting room of the animal hospital in Page, reading a magazine and waiting for a space in front of the X-ray machine, and the kennel starts hissing and bouncing toward the door. A giant beak would poke out through the bars. People would start freaking out. Usually I just kept reading.”

Farry said it wasn't long before he figured out that it was physically impossible to manage these birds and study them at the same time. It took hours to drive from the Vermilion Cliffs to the South Rim. Also, if a condor got especially sick, you had to drive it all the way to Phoenix, which sometimes meant driving for seven hours straight with a condor vomiting out of the sides of the kennel next to you.

Late in 1999, one of Farry's condors was shot to death and left on the ground where it had fallen. His first thought was that an enemy of the birds had finally acted on a threat. Then he got a call
from a man who had once been one of the most vocal enemies of the condor program, who said his fellow ranchers and some miners wanted to put up a reward for information leading to the capture of the condor killer. The shooter turned himself in a few days later, claiming he'd shot the bird by mistake. He paid a small fine and did some fieldwork.

“We didn't have very many enemies in the end,” Farry said. “And to be honest, the real yahoos were not the local ranchers and residents. The local folks we dealt with were good, hardworking, honest individuals who initially opposed us for a variety of reasons, and then changed their minds.”

Farry thought the phone call marked a turning point for the reintroduction program. After that, when strangers asked him what he did for a living, he told them.

W
hen condors bred in zoos don't act like condors in the wild, Les Reid tends to gloat. “We told the zoos not to lock the condors up,” he said. “We said, ‘Hey, leave them out in the wild so they can teach the young condors to survive.' They said ‘Oh no, we can't do that. We've spent God knows how many millions of dollars setting up all of these captive propagation facilities where we're raising young birds with puppets and such, and we don't want to waste that money now, do we?'”

Reid is a retired pipe fitter and a former member of the board of directors of the Sierra Club. With his wife, Sally, he helped ensure the protection of huge parts of the condor's range in the early 1960s by goading the California state legislature into passing a historic wilderness protection law. Reid said he did it partly to save the condors he and his wife often saw while hiking in the mountains of south-central California. “Those were the real birds,” Reid said. “Not like now. Two miles up in the sky, barely moving, none of those radio gizmos hanging off their wings. That's the way you're supposed to see a condor.”

The Reids used to argue that condors had certain rights. First
among them was the right to lead wild and unfettered lives. In retrospect, it's more than likely that this approach would have led directly to extinction, but Reid is not the kind of guy who tends to give a hoot about the experts. He's the kind of guy you want next to you in the trenches, cracking sick jokes about the enemy.

In his case, the enemy was (and is) the zoological community. Since the 1980s, he's been charging that zoos were out to make money off the condor, breeding them in cages and selling them to the highest bidder. This is a ridiculous and completely unsupportable charge, but Reid keeps making it: “Condors in Taiwan and Kuwait and such. I'm telling you I wouldn't be surprised.”

I admire Les and Sally Reid. Like the McMillan brothers, they were antidotes to claims that the environmental movement was an upper-class plot to steal the people's land. When extractive industries tried to use that argument to get at the condor's habitat, Les and a few of his pipe-fitter friends were happy to tell them that they had no idea what they were talking about.

The Reids retired to a modest home on the outskirts of a small California community called Pine Mountain Club in the early 1980s—a simple, sturdy A-frame with a wonderful view and a bedroom built into the rafters. They were living there when the last wild condor was trapped in 1987, and when the first group of zoo-bred birds was released 1992. Sally and Les didn't bother to go looking for the zoo-bred birds, because to them, they weren't really condors.

Sally Reid was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a few years after that. When her husband got too old to care for her, he was forced to move her to a managed care facility in Bakersfield, several hours' drive away. When Sally started fading in the late 1990s, Les often drove out to Bakersfield to see her several mornings a week. Usually he turned around and drove back to the A-frame in the af
ternoon. That's what he was doing when I parked my car in the driveway of his home in March 2002.

On the far side of this mountain, to the south, the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area was dealing with yet another warm, smoggy day. But on Reid's side it was snowing. When nobody came to his door, I took a walk in the snow, marveling at the size of the thick wet flakes. Then I got back into the car and fell asleep listening to a Neil Young album called
Zuma
. The bass solo at the start of the song “Cortez the Killer” always makes me think of condors rising in the wind.

When I woke up, a wiry old gray-haired man in work clothes was banging on the window of the car. “You're that reporter fella? Well come on in then. Let's start talkin!”

Reid unrolled his story as he unlocked his front door. It started in the early 1990s, after he'd unlocked this very same door and walked into his house. Right away he knew there was something wrong. After adjusting his hearing aid, he heard a bunch of ripping and bumping noises coming from behind the bedroom door, up at the top of the stairs.

“I thought it was the cat,” said Reid. “Then I saw the cat right in front of me. That's when I went up the stairs as quiet as I could, pulled the door open a crack, and peeked inside.”

Eight black birds with leathery heads and white triangles under their wings were staring back at Reid—eight young California condors, all on his bed. While Reid had been out visiting his wife they'd ripped a hole in the screen door connected to a small deck off the bedroom, pushing their way in and hopping up onto the bed. After ripping at the mattress and the sheets for a while, the birds froze when the door moved. One had a chunk of mattress hanging off its beak. Another appeared to be eating a pair of Reid's underpants.

“I said, ‘Okay, boys, you're not supposed to be here. You're going
to have to leave.' They just stood there staring back at me for a minute or two. Then they turned around and went back out through the hole in the screen. One by one, like a bunch of kids, without any argument at all. I closed the glass door and before long they had their beaks against it, like, ‘Hey! Why can't we come in here?' They were lucky it was me.”

The birds inspected Les Reid's deck. They walked back and forth on the railing. After a few hours they flew away. Then they came back. This is how it went for a couple of years, and Reid was grateful. He liked it when the young birds opened their wings to take in sunny days, basking and moving only their heads. He liked it when they stomped around on his roof, on the railings. He watched them through a sliding glass door for hours, making up names for individual birds. It made him feel young.

“They had this thing they did with the umbrella,” he said. “I've got this big umbrella at one end of the deck and the condors kept trying to stand on it. One flies off the roof and lands on top of the umbrella, but it's too slippery and the condor falls off onto the deck, and then another bird tries to do the same thing and falls off just like the first one. They were having fun out there.”

Les Reid knows he should have chased the condors off his deck, but he didn't even try. When government biologists came around he told them to get lost. Then he posted N
O
T
RESPASSING
signs all over his property. “The Department of Fish and Game would call and ask me to tell them what numbers were on the birds' tags and I'd say, ‘No, I'm not going to do that, it's none of your goddamned business what the numbers are.' And hang up. They'd call back and say, ‘We'll get you for that, Reid,' and I'd say, ‘No you won't. That'd be the biggest story the local papers ever had.'”

Why the condors picked this particular house is not completely clear. Part of the attraction had to be the sweeping view of the
mountains to the west and the north. Another part may have been a steady supply of raw meat from the grocery store. Government biologists have repeatedly charged that Reid was feeding the condors, noting that meat sales at the local deli spiked when the birds were around.

Reid swore he wasn't feeding anything except himself and the cat. He knew feeding condors was both illegal and a stupid thing to do. Anyway, people who did it ran the risk of seeing chunks of their own flesh bitten off, and the additional risk of being arrested and fined. Condors also pay a price when they start homing in on heaping plates of ground sirloin: they lose the desire to act like wild birds. Why spend the whole day flying around when you know the old guy with the view is throwing meat on his back porch? Why not land on that unattended picnic table and scarf down the bucket of fried chicken?

“I would never feed them,” Reid said again, looking more than slightly pissed off. “And don't go blaming people like me for messing up the condors. They were defective when they left the zoos. Okay?”

I don't know exactly what Les Reid meant when he used that word “defective,” and I don't think he did, either. But when the first of several different groups of condors settled in on his deck in 1998, it was clear that the zoos and the field biologists, not to mention the birds themselves, had a very serious problem. Condors released near the Sespe had been buzzing passing cars, slicing open garbage cans, walking through crowded business districts, and generally acting like a gang of bored punks.

The birds released in Arizona were having problems of their own, frequenting campsites and cluttering up the entrance to an old uranium mine. Shawn Farry was repeatedly forced to flush recalcitrant birds out of Fredonia and Kanab, chasing them past the
homes of unemployed people who blamed endangered species for their problems.

Those are the stories I was able to confirm; the rumors were even better: A condor lands in a small town in Southern California and walks into a bank, terrifying tellers and drawing police. A condor in northern Arizona eats a sandwich in the front seat of a Park Service pickup truck and then poses for a picture. A condor at the Hualapai Reservation in Arizona lingers near an airport runway until it is locked inside the pilot's lounge; by the time a field biologist from the Peregrine Fund arrives on the scene, the pilot's lounge has been destroyed and the condor is standing on a chair staring at a television tuned to NBC, which was showing pictures of the war in Kosovo. As far as I can tell, those first two stories are completely false, even though one of them came out of the mouth of a so-called media specialist hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service. But the third one's true, Farry says.

Farry thought reporters asked him way too many questions about the condor hijinks. Every time we talked, he stressed that many of the birds seemed wild from the start. Those were the condors that never slept on ledges the coyotes could reach, and the ones that never seemed to lose the wind. Farry didn't have to climb down and get those birds out of the bottoms of windless canyons, and he never had to jump the metal guardrail and chase them off the boulders in front of the El Tovar Hotel and Lounge on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. That was also a stupid thing to do, given that a slip could easily send him bouncing down a two-mile cliff. Crowds of gaping tourists often gathered while he worked. Usually they rooted for the birds.

Farry paused to explain why the friendly condors were the most at risk. Birds that flew toward humans and the things they built were probably the first to be “accidentally” shot by folks who didn't
recognize them, and among the first to suffer when the human world jumped up in front of them. Out in California, one of these condors died after slurping up what was probably antifreeze. And for a while the zoo-bred birds seemed dangerously fond of electric power poles. The view from the tops of these poles was very good, but coming and going was a problem—condors that ignored or did not see the lines kept slamming right into them and killing themselves. One bird almost sliced a wing off; another was nearly decapitated. One hit the positive power line with the tip of an outstretched wing, causing the bird to flip up and over and down onto the rest of the lines. When the other wing hit the negative current, the body of the condor shook violently for a moment. The accident caused the power to go out in the town of Fillmore, in Ventura County.
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Some of the people in uniforms hated doing this work. The man who seemed to hate it most was Dave Clendenen, the lead biologist in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Clendenen had been with the condor program since the mid-1980s, ruining his back on those endless zombie patrols and fighting on Noel Snyder's side in the bitter interoffice battles. By the late 1990s, he had spent more time in the field that any other biologist, including Carl Koford. He would do anything to help these birds.

But not this. This was absurd. Clendenen said he felt like a fool when he tried to explain “aversion therapy” to tourists or neighbors.

“I didn't join the Fish and Wildlife Service so I could throw sticks at birds,” he said. “Especially when all they did was wait for you to go away. It was obvious to me that we weren't getting very far training condors to act like wild birds, because they weren't wild birds anymore. They weren't the same condors I had known when they were wild.”

Clendenen helped restore the California condors in 1992. A few
months later he helped capture the condors that were still alive so they could be sent back to the zoo. Then he helped release a second group, much deeper into the sanctuary. It was some of these birds that showed up on Les Reid's porch. Clendenen called Mike Wallace, now at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, on a more or less regular basis to say that there was something wrong with the birds. Wallace told him to wait. The newly released condors were too young to be interested in breeding, and they didn't have a parent to teach them how to act in the wild, so naturally this transition was going to take a while.

The most consistent troublemakers were the young birds that tended to travel in gangs. These birds weren't interested in pairing off and searching for a starter cave, and like all the zoo-bred condors, they were provided with a steady supply of easy-to-find carcasses. So what did they do all day? Basically, they wandered around playing follow the leader, and the leader was often the least cautious condor in the group. Wallace, then the scientist in charge of the condor reintroduction program, said these young and restless groups of birds did exactly what a pack of young and restless humans would do: “They were like a bunch of teenagers whose parents left town without hiding the keys to the sports car,” he said. “They're going to fire that baby up and cruise around town.”

Wallace liked this metaphor because it implied that these problems would fade as the birds got older. When they started finding mates and tending fledglings, they'd have no time to mess around. Wallace said as much when exasperated field crews called him for advice. Hang in there and wait a bit, he told them. Give the birds a year or two and they'll repent their foolish ways.