Days of the Condor, Part I
Seeing my first California Condors was thrilling. Seeing them again, and once more again, was even better, leaving me committed to their protection.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
One day when I was in fifth grade, I figured out that on 11/11/11, I would turn 60 years old. I was obsessed with numbers, and even though I really should have been spending that time learning my state capitals, something about that discovery so resonated with me that I always knew I had to do something spectacular—a genuine once-in-a-lifetime thing—to mark that auspicious date so very far in my future.
That future date is now more than 14 years in my past, but as I planned in fifth grade, I celebrated it with a once-in-a-lifetime adventure—Russ and I went to the Grand Canyon so I could see my very first California Condors!
I’d first heard about condors in 1970 in the run-up to that heady first Earth Day—condors were already getting some protection in California and were a poster child for the proposed Endangered Species Act. It seemed wondrous that there could be a living creature consigned to a body unable to digest anything but meat yet incapable of taking a life, even to sustain its own. (Well, condors do swallow maggots here and there, but not on purpose.) And something about the condor’s face seemed to my eyes to exude soulful innocence. How could I not be charmed?
On that first Earth Day, California Condors existed only in California, but historically, they had a much wider range. Based on fossils and condor feathers found in archeological digs, they ranged along the Pacific coast from Baja California to British Columbia, along the southern US to Florida, and up the Atlantic coast through New York, though some researchers believe that feathers found in the East may have worked their way there via trade rather than being dropped by living condors. No matter how far their range extended before written records, it had shrunk by the early 19th century to a much more restricted area extending east only as far as western Colorado.
No condors were spotted in Arizona after 1924, and by the 1930s, they were limited exclusively to California.
In 1987, researchers realized that every single wild condor had dangerously high blood-lead levels, so every one of the few remaining wild birds was taken into captivity. At that point, none had ever successfully bred in captivity, but passionate, committed people kept working on the problem, and the very next year a captive pair did produce an egg; the captive birds had produced more than 100 eggs by 1994.
The reintroduction program released some birds in California starting in 1992, and in the Grand Canyon area of Arizona in 1996. I’d been to California twice before 11/11/11—in 1994, when my publishers sent me to Los Angeles for an American Bookseller’s Association meeting, and 1996, on a family vacation, but of course I didn’t see one on either trip. Russ and I took our baby Joey to the Grand Canyon in 1982, but that was long before condors had been reintroduced there.
On our splendid 11/11/11 trip, we didn’t see any condors in Grand Canyon National Park, though a park ranger at one of the main overlooks pointed out a cave where a nestling was hidden.
The condors we saw were at Vermilion Cliffs just outside the park—that’s where the captive-reared birds were released, and many still gravitate to that area. They stayed at a distance, but my long camera lens caught one or two wing-tag numbers.
Because birds were still being released in both California and Arizona and still needed close monitoring and sometimes medical help for lead poisoning, collisions, and other mishaps, American Birding Association rules didn’t allow birders to count them on our official life lists even as they were countable on eBird.
When I did my Lower-48 Big Year in 2013, my dear friend Eric Bowman and I attended the Monterey Bay Bird Festival and saw condors at very close range on a field trip led by employees of the Ventana Wildlife Society.
The California Condor was one of my 2013 total of 604 species, but not among the 595 “countable” species for my official Big Year list. The ABA changed this policy in 2014, making reintroduced native species countable if the released population is successfully reproducing, but those kinds of changes aren’t retroactive for Big Years.
The only other time I’ve seen any California Condors was in 2019 with Russ. We saw just one bird, but boy was it close!
It took off while we were watching and swung by for more close looks. Russ was as thrilled as I was!
The total number of California Condors in the world is now somewhere around 560 individuals, about 360 flying free in California, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, and Mexico, and about 200 in the captive breeding program. This is an order of magnitude larger than the 22 remaining in the world in the 1980s, but there should be many more considering that the condors have produced more than a thousand chicks in captivity and in the wild.
The primary cause of mortality for condors is ingesting lead from bullets and shot. In 2007, despite the NRA and a huge hunting lobby opposing it, Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a state law phasing out lead ammunition within the condor’s range. Tragically, condors are notoriously illiterate and incapable of reading range maps, so birds were still eating a lot of carcasses that had been shot with lead bullets or shot. In 2013, Jerry Brown signed a stronger law that would phase out lead ammo for all wildlife hunting state-wide, ending it completely by 2019. Again, the NRA and hunting lobbies vigorously opposed it, and these entities are still doing their best to make it impossible for such legislation to pass in Arizona or Utah. One of Obama’s last acts as president was to sign an executive order prohibiting any hunting with lead ammo on federal lands, but the first thing Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, did on his first day in office in 2017 was to overturn that ban, claiming that sportsmen’s groups were united against it.
In addition to lead poisoning, individuals in the southern California population are still ingesting DDT and its metabolites when they feed on large sea mammals washed up along the coast. That’s because for decades both before and after the pesticide was banned in 1972, the largest DDT manufacturer in the world, the Montrose Chemical Corporation, was discharging waste chemicals through sewers into the Palos Verdes Shelf and dumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of DDT and chemical waste into the ocean via barges. They were legally required to dispose of those barrels at a deep-sea site but decided it was faster and cheaper to dump it close to shore; to prevent detection, a great many of the barrels were punctured for faster sinking, creating a massive, persistent toxic site that, over a half century later, still causes cancer in sea lions and thinned eggshells in the condors and Bald Eagles who feed on their carcasses.
Other recent causes of mortality for juvenile and adult condors include collisions with powerlines, electrocution when they attempt to alight on the lines or poles, and even zinc poisoning from ingesting pennies tossed over the Grand Canyon.
Also, nestlings still sometimes die when their parents feed them plastic and other trash apparently mistaken for carcasses.
Even as conservation and wildlife biologists and other caring people work desperately to save condors, millionaires, corporate powers, and their minions complain that the species is a “relict” or “living fossil” that doesn’t belong in the modern world anyway. The fact that corals, lobsters, horseshoe crabs, and many other species, including Sandhill Cranes, are older than condors doesn’t matter to greedy hoarders who don’t want a penny of their taxes to support conservation.
Since long before humans entered the scene in the Americas, condors have been here cleaning up messes. What we’ve done to them is unconscionable no matter how you look at it, but somehow in this topsy-turvy world, as government officials applaud an ICE “officer” for shooting a young mother in the face and try to block state prosecutors from investigating the killer even as they pressure state prosecutors to investigate the victim’s family, the very concept of conscience no longer seems relevant. America has sold its soul to billionaires, white supremacists, misogynists, and medical quacks.
Our nation used to be at the forefront in both scientific research and in creating laws and regulations to protect humans, wildlife, and the air, water, soil, and other natural resources that we living beings all need and share. Corporate America and the uglier, greedier elements of what was once called the conservative movement were never onboard with conservation and environmentalism, only grudgingly going along at all when massive popular movements put profitability at stake. These ugly forces that have transformed my beloved Minnesota into a police state are clearly not invested in protecting people, much less our fellow creatures. We human beings who still have a heart and soul must resist, for condors and for ourselves.
By spring of last year, we had lost our last cat. That became an opportunity to travel. I said I had flown over the Grand Canyon but never had seen it close up. Paul wanted to see the Sphere in Las Vegas. So we headed west in August. We drove to the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas, checked into one of the South Village lodges. We walked to the canyon rim at Bright Angel Trailhead and were admiring the incoming thunderstorm. There on a ledge, was my lifer California Condor with the tag E3. He stood out against the dark storm skies. I was able to get a couple of decent pictures. With lightning streaking the skies, we headed to dinner. What a day!
What beautiful pictures and writing. Very warm wishes to everyone in Minnesota in these difficult times. We who still have a heart and soul are sending positive vibes your way.