Defenders Magazine

Condors Take Flight Again

Riding an updraft with one of the continent's biggest, rarest birds.

By Bill Updike

© U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

The huge, dark birds glided in lazy spirals on a rising draft of air as I stood watching from a craggy spire above them, lost in reverie. Less than 100 miles south of the high-tech capital of the world, California's Silicon Valley, I was witnessing a sight older than the Stone Age: two condors riding a thermal.

The sight of the wheeling birds at Pinnacles National Monument provoked awe (and more than a little vertigo) for two reasons: because I was watching the early stages of the remarkable reincarnation of a ghost species, and because the 20-pound, almost 10-foot-wide birds are sublime flyers.

"I've gotten to know these birds very well, but even after all these years I never get used to how large and agile they are," says Kelly Sorenson, executive director of the Ventana Wildlife Society, a group that, with some help from Defenders of Wildlife (see sidebar), partnered with the National Park Service to reintroduce condors at Pinnacles. "They're expert flyers and I'm always just amazed by them."

There's poetry to a soaring condor more profound than any human language, and a unique beauty. Though not known for their classical good looks, condors are nonetheless impressive. They are the largest soaring bird in continental North America, and can be distinguished from their vulture brethren by their great size, their relatively small tails and by the long white feather triangles on the undersides of their wings. Condors' heads are largely naked and covered with wrinkled, orange skin.

But without the protections of the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and years of work by conservationists, these striking beasts likely would have fallen off the cliff of existence, with no thermals on which to escape.

When European settlers came to North America, condors ranged the West from British Columbia to the Baja Peninsula and numbered in the thousands. But by the middle of the 20th century, their numbers had been reduced to about 150 due to shooting, poisoning, collisions with man-made structures, habitat loss and other reasons.

In 1949, Belle Benchley, then director of the San Diego Zoological Society, first proposed a captive-rearing program to save the birds. But that proposal sparked opposition from some conservationists, who feared that captive breeding would displace efforts to save the species in the wild. The critics also were skeptical that the captive-reared condors could be successfully returned to fly free and feared that reintroduced birds would introduce disease to the wild population.

The condor's situation became so dire by the 1980s, though, that most opposition went the way of the dodo bird. By the fall of 1982, there were only 22 condors left. Soon after, the decision was made to capture the remaining birds in order to maximize the genetic diversity for the captive-rearing program. On Easter Sunday, 1987, the California condor officially disappeared from the wild.

"The idea that we could have saved them without the [captive-breeding] program is just false," says Jesse Grantham, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is the California condor coordinator for the recovery program. "We could have bought up all the land in Southern California and it wouldn't have done it."

"We waited until we got down to 22 birds in the wild, and then we almost lost them," he adds. "Now we're essentially trying to recreate a species."

It's been a difficult run. Condors are giants in the bird world, and not easy to catch or handle. To capture the birds, biologists had to use cannon nets set up at bait stations, as well as the old Native American technique of setting pit traps—placing someone in a hole below a carcass to grab the bird's legs when it came to feed. With so few left, no mistakes could be made—even one death would have been catastrophic.

By most accounts, the captive-rearing program has been successful. From the 27 birds in the original captive flock in 1987, more than 250 birds have been hatched at the four breeding locations—San Diego Wild Animal Park, Los Angeles Zoo, the Peregrine Fund's World Center for Birds of Prey in Idaho and the Oregon Zoo. The captive birds are kept isolated from humans, but reared as young chicks by human-held puppets made to look like adult condors. More recently, biologists have been stressing the importance of allowing captive mentor adults to show the chicks the ropes.

With just 27 birds to breed from there has been a significant genetic bottleneck—a small gene pool from which to draw. But the captive-breeding centers take great care to diversify the stock as much as possible.

Getting the birds to behave once they were re-released in the wild turned out to be a much more difficult task than captive-rearing. Though traditionally brash and curious animals, the early captive-reared condors were even less afraid of us bipeds and of our stuff. Some of the first birds released in Southern California starting in 1992 flew into and were electrocuted by power lines. Others attacked car windshield wipers, entered campgrounds and ripped up tents and sleeping bags, and chased people down on backcountry trails. One condor, driven either by curiosity or hunger, entered someone's bedroom and ripped up his mattress and his (thankfully) unoccupied shorts.

Like teenagers without adult supervision, the original condors were flying amok. Many of the first-released birds had to be returned to captivity and retrained. Condor biologists began stepping up what they call aversive training—schooling the young miscreants to be more afraid of humans and our structures. The scientists built fake utility poles that would give birds a small shock when they alighted on them. When the biologists interacted with the birds, they were much rougher in order to keep the condors afraid of people. The birds also were allowed to spend more time with their captive parents, who would cajole them when they misbehaved. These efforts have succeeded in preventing wild birds from approaching people, and the condors are getting into much less trouble.

Despite the successes, though, there remain a number of challenges. The largest and perhaps most politically complex problem is a heavy metal—lead. As scavengers, condors feed on carcasses of large mammals—deer, feral pigs and others—oftentimes those killed by hunters. The birds ingest small fragments of shattered bullets left behind in gut piles, and become poisoned by the metal. Lead poisoning can lead to brain damage and death, and can be caused by pieces as small as a BB. "We won't have a self-sustaining population of condors until we deal with the lead threat," says Sorenson bluntly.

But dealing with it has proven complicated. There are non-lead bullets on the market that are ballistically comparable to lead bullets, and in some cases superior, but getting hunters to make the transition has proven a slow process. Some believe that change won't occur, or occur fast enough for the sake of the condor, until some legislation is passed that either bans lead bullets outright, or combines a lead-bullet ban with a program to encourage hunters to use alternatives (see sidebar).

To keep condors away from lead, biologists currently feed the birds with cow carcasses, which creates new problems by decreasing the opportunities for the scavengers to learn to "hunt" for food on their own as well as potentially putting them at risk for disease. "Nothing's foolproof," Grantham warns. "Just when you think you have one solution to a problem, another one pops up." 

And other challenges abound. Booming real estate development is a general problem in central and southern California, and one particular development project, called Tejon Ranch, is of great import to the condor and other wildlife species. The privately owned 270,000-acre ranch rests in a wild lands "necklace" north of Los Angeles that runs from the coast to the Sierra Nevadas. It is at the core of the condors' historical feeding grounds, and an essential wildlife corridor for other animals.

The good news is that plans for the ranch include a condor preserve and a conservation easement that may total 100,000 acres. The bad news is that the ranch owners are also planning a new power plant, industrial complex and housing developments to go along with the oil and gas leasing, limestone mining and ranching and farming already occurring on the site. They also will continue to permit hunting with lead ammunition on the preserve.

In addition to the sprouting of homes and development in the rural exurbia of Tejon, conservationists are also concerned about industrial development elsewhere, including the siting of wind power turbines, and increases in oil and gas exploration in Los Padres National Forest now being encouraged by the Bush administration.

The feeding of small pieces of garbage, called microtrash, by adult birds to their offspring also causes great worry. Biologists aren't totally certain why the birds collect and feed microtrash—nuts and bolts, pieces of wire and plastic, bottle caps and other things—to their young. The condors may be confusing the trash with small animal bones—an important source of calcium for the nestlings.

Regardless of the reason, biologists agree that consumption of microtrash is a big problem. Veterinarians recently removed 36 bottle caps from the stomach of one young bird. And some condor nests look like miniature landfills. But solving this problem may be even more difficult than solving the lead issue, considering our throw-away society's lack of recycling and propensity for littering.

Despite the challenges, though, there is much room for hope. At press time there were a total of 279 condors alive, with 121 of those soaring in the wild in the three locations—California, the Baja Peninsula and Arizona—where they've been reintroduced. Three wild-born chicks are now flying free for the first time in 20 years in California and Arizona. And many others are waiting for their turn. It's a great leap from the 22 that remained when the animals were first declared extinct in the wild.

"It's tragic to think that we almost lost this bird," says Grantham. "What we've learned is that we never want to get in that situation again."