Photo courtesy of San Diego Zoo
Beauty in the Beasts
The California condor's unlikely success story
By Christy Karras
Since the reintroduction of California condors to the Utah/Arizona border region a dozen years ago, the condors have eaten lots of things. Sometimes, their choices are cringe-inducing: the consummate scavengers’ first meal in the wild, for example, was a dead pet dog.
But nothing prepared Grand Canyon park rangers for their discovery on a day last March, when reports of giant, circling black birds led curious people to look over the edge of a cliff, hoping to see what the beasts were having for dinner.
When rangers arrived at the feeding site, they found the condors gathered, feasting on the corpse of a man who’d been missing in the canyon for two months. It was gruesome—not only the nature of the discovery, but the creatures themselves: their fleshy, snakelike necks, shiny feathers, bodies as big as boulders—and wingspans wider than the length of the human body itself.
The man’s body was hauled away—for the sake of propriety, and also because human bodies are considered hazardous waste. Those who know about condors always are interested in what the birds are eating, especially since it could be almost anything—as long as it’s already dead. But the content of the birds’ diet isn’t as important as what they are doing and where, because without strenuous and optimistic human intervention, condors wouldn’t exist at all.
Their population now stands at about 300; about half of those live in the wild. That’s more than 10 times the 22 birdsat the species’ nadir in 1982—making it one of the West’s best conservation success stories.
The birds are unlikely celebrities. Seeing a condor is like looking at a pterodactyl or some other remnant of dinosaur times. They can weigh up to 25 pounds (about 10 times the weight of a Red-tailed Hawk). Their wingspans can reach almost 10 feet—wider than the widest human arm span ever recorded, wide enough that they could completely blanket an old Volkswagen Beetle. They can glide through the air at up to 55 mph at up to 15,000 feet in altitude, traveling 100 miles in a day in search of food. Many people view them as prehistoric relics, and in a way, they are: Condors plied the skies during the Pleistocene era, eating mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.
The idea of preserving something so ancient is one of the reasons public and private conservation groups are working together to save the condor through the most expensive wildlife rehabilitation project in American history. A private, nonprofit conservation group, The Peregrine Fund, oversees captive breeding and periodically releases hand-raised young birds at Arizona’s Vermillion Cliffs site, just south of the Utah/Arizona border. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Arizona and Utah state wildlife divisions manage condor territory and help keep track of the birds once they’re released.
Donors and volunteers have spent millions of dollars and countless hours to prevent the birds’ extinction—a lot of work when you consider that condors aren’t a crucial part of the ecosystem and no other species depends on them.
But they say humans, who are responsible for the condor’s decline, have a responsibility to prevent its extinction. If we fail to save the condor, they reason, we have failed to save a part of the wilderness we ought to have been able to preserve. This quest reminds us of our own power for destruction or salvation.
In other words, we should save the condor because we can—and because something this strange is definitely worth saving. “The aesthetics of it, and the way that affects people—a condor flying over a place is as amazing as the Grand Canyon,” said Chris Parish, director of the Peregrine Fund’s reintroduction project. “The people who see that don’t question the money.”
Early last spring, retired BLM biologist Mike Small led the St. George-area Red Cliffs chapter of the Audubon Society on a field trip to see the 50 or so condors that now live in the crevices of the Vermillion Cliffs.
At a viewing area below the release site, about two and a half hours’ drive from St. George, a dozen or so bird lovers gathered under a cool, bright sky with their scopes and binoculars, hoping at least one or two of the creatures would be home.
And there were condors, visible with the naked eye, despite the distance. They rose above the brightly colored cliffs in an upward spiral, circling lazily on the thermals. These birds rarely flap; they don’t have to. Instead, they simply step off a ledge and glide upward, lifted by air thermals, and swirl together in an effortless circle.
For bird watchers, there’s great appeal in the idea of seeing a significant percentage of a species’ entire population in a single day; the Audubon Society group spotted about 26. “We’ve had people from all over, in fact internationally, to see the condors,” Small said.
To Shelia Smith, who lives in St. George, seeing the condors was a rare chance to view a bird that seems primordial in its size and shape.
“It’s like time travel to me,” Smith said, a little breathless, as she watched nine birds—3 percent of the world’s population—gathering on a rock in the distance and spreading their awning-sized wings to catch the warmth of the sun. “This is so special, because there are so few birds, and here we are, so close.”
Condors comically resemble the giant vultures perched next to sun-baked animal skulls in cartoons and postcards. When they come in for a landing, their long, muscular legs hang below them, swinging forward and back while their heads track from side to side. Dinnertime is typically spent with heads buried in rotting animal flesh. But their fans think they deserve a better reputation. “As a class, scavengers are very smart, alert, curious animals,” Small said.
At a celebration of the species’ recovery in California earlier this year, wildlife biologist Jan Hamber wondered aloud why humans are so fascinated by condors. She answered her own question with a quote from early 20th-century ornithologist William Dawson. “For me, the heart of mystery, of wonder, and of desire lies with the California condor, that magnetic and almost legendary figure which still haunts the vastness of our lessening wilderness.” Dawson wrote this in 1911, when the birds were still flying up and down the West Coast. “I am not ashamed to have fallen in love with so gentle a ghoul.”
The reintroduction process hasn’t been easy. Even under the best of circumstances, the birds aren’t very good at reproducing on their own; they don’t reach sexual maturity for about six to eight years, and when they find mates and breed, the young often don’t survive. When biologists captured every one of the remaining birds in the 1980s and took them to the Los Angeles Zoo and the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park, they artificially increased reproduction by hand-raising chicks from birth. This allowed parents to lay more eggs, instead of spending precious time caring for their young.
The first few condors were released into the wild again in Baja, California. That was followed by Arizona—a place they hadn’t been seen since 1924.
The condors’ spectacular habitat at the edge of the Vermillion Cliffs is north of Highway 89, past the road out to Jacob Lake and the Grand Canyon’s north rim. During winter, the birds generally forage south of their home. A few pairs have permanently settled in the Grand Canyon area, where park visitors can sometimes see several at a time.
The best chance to see the birds in Utah comes in summer, when about half the Arizona population ranges northward. Members of the Audubon Society have seen as many as 16 at a time near Kolob Reservoir, on the north end of Zion National Park. Though there are no permanent nesting sites in Utah, Small says it’s bound to happen.
The chicks released years ago are finally reaching breeding age and forming pairs, which they maintain for life (though not always successfully—as with human populations, it sometimes takes birds a few tries to decide on a mate). They nest in rock crevices and bear only one egg every two years. When chicks emerge, they are covered in grayish fuzz and their white heads looks like bare skulls. For condor watchers, every chick is a cause for celebration; by the start of 2008, seven birds had fledged in the wild.
Transmitters tell researchers where the condors are—and ultimately, how they die. Sometimes, electricity from power poles or accidents get them. But the most common cause of death—and the one most responsible for the birds’ steep decline in the first place—is lead poisoning. It’s the result of an unfortunate combination: a dietary staple of dead deer, extreme sensitivity to lead’s toxic effects, and a home where humans frequently hunt deer with bullets containing lead.
After several birds died and others had to be brought in for treatment to remove lead from their blood, the state of Arizona began giving copper bullets to hunters with permits in condor areas. Utah hunters are encouraged, though not required, to use copper ammunition.
The issue illustrates the difficulties surrounding conservation in the West. Last year, a loud contingent of condor supporters successfully lobbied for a ban on lead-core ammunition in California’s condor country—an unlikely occurrence in Utah, where many people don’t know much about condors, and others aren’t eager to support a carnivorous animal that requires a big habitat. But the condors won’t survive in Utah without hunters’ support: Most of the birds that have tried to set up permanent homes in Utah died of lead poisoning. (Coincidentally, Barnes Bullets, one of the world’s largest and oldest copper bullet manufacturers, is based in American Fork, Utah).
Parish grew up in the kind of small Arizona town where “we always had these people coming into our community and talking about endangered species and saying, ‘You’re going to lose half your land.’” He still considers himself a hunter and stresses that no one is going to ask hunters or ranchers to change anything except their ammunition—which could help more than the condors. Studying how the condors die, he says, “We’ve stumbled onto this pathway of lead poisoning that includes me, as a hunter. I had no idea that the very meat that I take home to my family could have lead fragments in it.”
He adds that cooperation is improving; more than 80 percent of hunters in northern Arizona have switched to copper bullets.
Conservationists are trying to preserve a balance between the birds’ need for space and the public’s fascination—galvanizing support while keeping the birds out of harm’s way. To them, the condor symbolizes our natural history and the present-day wilderness we are simultaneously losing and celebrating. Its survival represents mankind’s tenacity, ingenuity and compassion, even as its near demise represents human folly.
“This allows us to say, ‘Look what we’ve done for ourselves.’” Parish says. “It’s not so much that we owe it to the condors; we owe it to ourselves to not let this species slip away.”
Christy Karras is a former associate editor of the Wasatch Journal. She writes travel guides to the American Southwest, spending much of her time doing research from the back of a motorcycle. She lives in Seattle.
