Watch for the California Condor Turns Sober

Back on July 8 in Connecticut, Gail Kaufman piled her husband, Alan; her daughters, Skye, 5, and Megan, 2 1/2, and the family pet, a big English sheep dog named Barkley, into a Volkswagen camper van and headed off to California for a reunion with a tragically troubled old friend.

The reunion would take the form of a big party, attended by 250 people, that began Friday night at a campground on nearby Mt. Pinos and continued all day Saturday and Sunday at a remote spot along Mil Potrero Highway, 25 miles north of here in Kern County.

Sense of Bittersweet

Yet it was all carried out with a profound sense of the bittersweet. Heavy on the bitter. Laced heavily with the sad.

For the “friend” the Kaufmans drove out from Connecticut to be with is not a human, but a bird, the California condor. And the event the Kaufmans came to California to attend was the 13th annual Condor Watch and Tequila Bust.

It is a party that honors the condor, yet this year an agonizing reality hung over the campfires and the hibachi grills. There are eight condors left to watch this year. By next August, there may be none left in the 9 million acres of natural habitat that has supported the species since some point in prehistory.

The condor watch is a happening that began in 1972. It has been held on the first weekend of August each year as a chance for bird experts, bird watchers, condor biologists and other experts to gather and let their hair down while quietly expressing solidarity with a critically endangered species. The event’s existence has never before been extensively publicized, even by reporters who have been invited to attend--stories that have alluded to it have discreetly left off the “tequila bust” part of the name. It has served mainly as a gathering of the condor’s human clan.

The night the reunion began this year, there was a good deal of drinking and bawdy songs, sung around the campfire with accompaniment by guitars long since out of tune.

Always before, the party aspect of the condor watch had seemed in control. After all, there had been hope that the condor, whose numbers in the wild 13 years ago ran into the high 20s or 30s, would somehow make it and avoid extinction--defying the odds that held for it the same fate as the passenger pigeon and other animals that once roamed the Earth but don’t anymore.

This 13th condor watch, though, was different--tamer, quieter, more sober than its predecessors. It was different for the Kaufmans and many of the other people who attended because, by the time the next condor watch is scheduled to occur, there very well may be no condors left in the wild to see.

Political squabbling that has pervaded the public debate over how best to preserve the small remaining condor population continues, and in fact, it remains to be seen whether a program under way now to capture remaining wild condors will leave three, six or none in the wild when the current spate of trappings concludes in the fall.

There are eight birds known to be in the wild at this moment. Two of them are now scheduled to be captured and sent to zoos in San Diego and Los Angeles. A ninth bird was caught two weeks ago.

This concept is called “protective custody.” Captured birds will join 19 others that have either been caught and placed in captivity or born there in a breeding program that shows some signs of promise but is as yet untested as a means of ensuring the survival of the species. Theoretically, at least, condors could be released back into the wild in from two to 10 years, after their numbers have recovered in zoos.

The most likely number of birds that will be left in the wild by next summer is three, but even that could change if the combination of as-yet-unidentified conditions that reduced the wild population from 19 to fewer than 10 in just one year occurs again this winter. The deaths of any more birds would probably assure the capture of every living condor.

Lloyd Kiff, curator of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Westwood, one of the main groups active in the fight to somehow save the condor from extinction, started the condor watch 13 years ago. He says there will be another one next August, no matter what.

“We’ll continue to have condor watches, if only as testimony to our kinship with the bird,” he said. “If all we can see is eagles, we’ll watch eagles.”

Kaufman identifies herself as “just a mother” transplanted from California to Connecticut by the job transfers of her husband. Twelve years ago, she attended her first condor watch and has missed just two because of her now three-year absence from the state.

She is a person Kiff describes as a hard-core but typical member of the condor’s human support system. It is a group of people ranging from blue collar to white collar who are professionally or emotionally committed to trying to find a way for the bird to survive in the face of almost insurmountable odds.

“This is probably the last time my kids will be able to see condors in the wild,” Kaufman said, standing on the shoulder of the highway with everyone else.

The scene was like a movie parodying bird watching. Mil Potrero Highway runs along the side of a mountain range that turns north through the Los Padres National Forest.

For at least an eighth of a mile, the highway’s edge was a continuing line of spotting telescopes, long camera lenses on tripods and humans, wearing binoculars, staring out into the sky.

“Condors,” Kaufman said, “are like Siberian tigers. They represent something we can’t control and which we are screwing up. I want my children to understand this vanishing Earth concept.”

Five years ago, Kiff found a painting at a garage sale in Pennsylvania, depicting a possum contemplating a butterfly.

The summer after Kiff found it, he started bestowing it each year as the “revolving revolting award” to the person who makes the first verified sighting at the condor watch. The painting is so ugly that no winner has ever let pass the first opportunity to return it.

Twice before, the award was won by Michael Fry, a professor of avion science at UC Davis who is one of the people with binoculars at the roadside.

Like many in the condor movement, Fry is not at all certain that the plan to capture the wild condors and put them in zoos for several years is a good idea. There is serious concern that, by removing the wild population from its natural habitat, the species’ store of cultural knowledge may be lost.

Conveys Information

Many biologists believe that even an animal as primitive as the carrion-eating condor conveys through its generations information on such critical subjects as the locations of good nesting sites, the boundaries of the range area and even, perhaps, techniques for finding food. With visual acuity seven times that of man--and a measure better than eagles’--condors search for their meals from the air, covering vast amounts of territory in the process.

Fry worries that zoo-bred condors may never be able to replicate this natural set of skills. He and Kiff take different sides in the dispute, with Kiff arguing that while the capture technique is nothing more than a last, desperate step, it must be taken or there will be no species left to worry about. Between the two of them, this is not a new subject of disagreement.

“It makes me feel betrayed by the whole program,” Fry says.

“But, Michael,” Kiff counters, “we lost 40% of the population last year.”

Permanent Trophy?

“I think there is a very good chance that this will be the last year we will be able to see these birds in the wild,” Fry says. “I’m afraid it (the painting) is going to become a permanent trophy at this point.”

Next to him, Jack Ingram, a sound engineer who has toured with Bette Midler, the group America, Stevie Wonder and Santana, lines up his binoculars, too.

He remembers being profoundly impressed by the sheer size of the condor, which weighs in at about 25 pounds and has an eight-foot wing span. It is the Boeing 747 of natural aviation and has such a commanding presence in the sky that it can be spotted five miles away with binoculars and with the naked eye at that distance by anyone who has seen more than just a couple of condors.

“It’s a hunk,” Ingram says, groping for a way to describe the bird. “It just hangs there.

“I think that’s very, very sad from a social standpoint,” he says of the symbolism of this condor watch. “From the point of view of the bird, it’s an even bigger catastrophe. We can only hope that things will turn around and we’ll be back here, doing this again.”

At noon Saturday, Kiff reached into his car, pulled out a bell and started ringing it. Fry had won the award again.

The bird was a long way off, but it was unmistakably a condor. White markings under the wings gave it away, along with its stable, soaring flight, achieved almost without resort to wing flapping.

It was probably UN-1 (“UN” for “unknown,” or a bird never fitted with a radio transmitter to track its movements).

A circle of people formed around Kiff and Fry as Kiff presented the trophy. “It looks like he (Fry) may be stuck with it,” Kiff said. “I hope I do get to give it away,” Fry said to the crowd. “It really would be sad if all of the birds are gone.”

Mingling in the crowd are two people with a unique perspective on what is happening. They are Peter Bloom and Jesse Grantham, National Audubon Society employees who work at the Condor Research Center in Ventura. They are in charge of trapping two more birds and would be charged with finding and capturing all of the rest of the wild condors if that step is approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Department of Fish and Game.

“The real challenge is saving the species in the wild,” Grantham says. “Anybody can capture a bird and put it in a zoo. But these birds are like works of art and you can’t replicate the Mona Lisa. I’d go right up to the wire with it. It’s not time to give up.”

Since April, the condor center has been conducting a daily feeding program for the condors, leaving calf carcasses out in fields where the birds can easily find them and at locations that are safe for the condor. Grantham hopes such techniques may stave off extinction in the wild for a while longer and prolong the period in which the bird will have its last chance to succeed.

But even Grantham recognizes that another winter like last year’s would seal the fate of any birds that remained. Even condor scientists who oppose the capture program would accept a roundup under those conditions.

“Trapping condors,” Bloom says, “is something that (as a professional challenge) I really enjoy.

“But folding a wild bird’s wings up for the last time is no pleasure. Unfortunately, at this point, it is the only thing we can do.”