Not Condor Country

Never in a million years did Robert Mesta expect the good people of Grand Canyon country to greet his beloved California condors with such contempt.

But there it is, on top of a stack of like-minded public comments sitting in his Ventura office, the honest opinion of Orderville, Utah, residents Janice and Larry Esplin.

“The condor is not a majestic bird but a common buzzard which lives on road kill,” the Esplins wrote. “If you think that we or any tourist would be excited to see these birds gnawing away on a dead animal carcass along the road you are very mistaken. That is not a pretty sight.”

So much for the welcome wagon.

Not only had the Esplins voiced their opposition to a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service plan to reintroduce the endangered birds to the Grand Canyon region, so had just about every elected official in southern Utah and northern Arizona, from the mayor of Panguitch, Utah (pop. 1,444), to U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch.

“The California condor was just beat up,” Mesta said ruefully. “They said, ‘Why don’t you just keep them in California?’ ”

As the mastermind behind the Grand Canyon plan, Mesta found himself in unfamiliar territory. The perspective from his office, the headquarters of Fish & Wildlife Service’s decade-long effort to save the condors from extinction, is quite different.

Here the bird gets reverential treatment. Audubon drawings of the condor vie with glossy telephoto images for wall space. A visitor is handed an enormous feather to admire. A new egg hatching is cause for celebration.

And the goodwill extends beyond the Ventura office. Southern Californians have rejoiced in every successful condor release in Los Padres National Forest and mourned every time a zoo-bred bird has died from eating antifreeze or landing on an electric pole.

This is unabashedly condor country.

But what the Esplins and others were telling Mesta was that Utah and Arizona are not condor country. Sure, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says the condor lived there before the Ice Age and returned briefly in the 18th century. Sure, some bird watcher reported seeing a condor swooping in for a fresh carcass dinner near Williams, Ariz., in 1924. But who believes any of that? Certainly not Janice Esplin.

“I wouldn’t believe anything they say,” she said in a telephone interview. “I just don’t want any more of their monkey business.”

There are a lot of people in southern Utah and northern Arizona like Esplin who have had it up to here with the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The California condor is just the latest in a string of threatened creatures whose need for environmental protection has caused a deep bitterness and mistrust of the government among residents.

“Only in America would this happen,” said Joe Judd, a commissioner in Utah’s Kane County, just miles from the Vermilion Cliffs release site. “All the people that do not live here want to enact laws to control how we live.”

The list of sins that residents recount about endangered species is long. The desert tortoise is blamed for destroying millions of dollars in development opportunities in the city of St. George in Utah’s Washington County. The prairie dog, victim of too many deft poisoners over the years, is now one of the most pampered and least welcome residents of Panguitch, Utah. Along the Utah-Arizona border, many residents believe the Mexican spotted owl is responsible for shutting down a lumber mill in Fredonia, Ariz., last spring, costing 400 people there and in outlying areas their jobs.

The mill closing hit Janice Esplin hard. Her niece’s husband was out of a job, as were many of her friends in Orderville.

“This little town has rested on that mill,” Esplin said. “It was just devastating. Now these men are taking jobs at $5 an hour. They can’t raise a family on that.

“It was really terrible,” she said. “And it was all because of the lies that were told about the spotted owl.”

Into this atmosphere, Mesta first set foot last fall.

“What we walked into was a tradition,” he said. “A tradition of anti-endangered species feelings. These folks had been stewing, with no outlet, for years.”

Outraged residents turned to local politicians who were familiar with the desert tortoise, the spotted owl and the prairie dog. And they found plenty of sympathy, in particular from Republicans Hatch and U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett.

“There was already a feeling of very great and intense distrust of and almost anger at the Endangered Species Act in Washington County,” said Hatch aide Robert Dibblee. “It’s obvious that the Kane County people were seeing what was happening to their neighbor county and didn’t want to go through the same hell.”

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At the request of Hatch and Bennett, the agency extended its public comment period twice. By the time it finally ended on April 1, Mesta had 206 written comments he had to answer. A little more than half were favorable, such as that of Tom Morrison of Salt Lake City who called the Utah senators closed-minded.

“Perhaps they fear the condors are more intelligent than imagined,” he wrote. “And knowing the Republicans abysmal voting record on the environment, they fear they will be the first carrions used by these great birds.”

Environmentalists questioned whether the birds would be safe in the hostile country. Those opposed to the condor also had a lot of questions--some ridiculous, but some pertinent and sensible--that Mesta had to respond to.

And he had to come up with a way to sooth all those angry feelings.

What resulted was a lengthy memorandum of understanding between the agency and the county and municipal governments of the affected areas. Because the condor has a vast range and is capable of flying 150 miles in a day, that area extends through a quarter of Utah and well into Arizona. The agreement isn’t finished yet, but Mesta is optimistic that it will resolve the debate over the condors.

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“I can’t say it is a done deal yet,” he said. “But we hope to have a release in June.”

Under the agreement, the local governments will have a say in the program, including the power to ask the agency to take the condors elsewhere if things aren’t working out.

“We’ve come to an agreement that I think will satisfy everyone concerned,” Kane County Commissioner Judd said. “They’ve agreed to put a lot of strings on the condors and we are holding onto all of the strings.

“No economic development would be stopped because of the condor,” Judd said. “If we wanted to develop a coal mine, this bird couldn’t stop it.”

The agreement also offers assurances that anyone who accidentally kills or harms a condor won’t be prosecuted. Concerns that the birds might be struck by cars while feeding on road kill on busy Highway 89, near the release site, have been alleviated by promises that agency staff will patrol the road, pulling any carcasses onto the shoulder.

The agency plans a hunter education program to gently discourage--but not force--hunters from using lead bullets. Lead can contaminate a deer carcass, killing a condor that feeds on the remains.

Finally, the agency has built in a timeline for the reintroduction program. If after five years at VermilionCliffs, 40% or more of the condors are dying and the birds are not finding their own food, “serious consideration” will be given to terminating the project.

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Both Utah senators are willing to accept the document, as long as their local constituents agree to sign it.

“If they are comfortable with that proposed plan, then we would be comfortable as well,” said Dibblee, Hatch’s aide.

But the debate over the condor continues to fuel Hatch’s distrust of the 1973 act, Dibblee said.

“My boss believes the Endangered Species Act should be reformed,” he said. “The human factor has been lost. We need to protect species, but should be able to take into account the economy.”

It might have been simpler to stick to releasing condors in the wild back country of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

But the condor has history in the Grand Canyon region, the kind of history that makes environmentalists long to see the birds returned to their former stomping ground.

Eleven thousand years ago, condors were common in the Southwest, but were driven to near extinction during the Pleistocene era. They took refuge from the Ice Age by fleeing to the Pacific coast, expanding their appetites to include seafood and developing into a slightly varied genus, the California condor.

During the 1700s, scientists say, some California condors returned to the Southwest, probably in pursuit of the herds of cattle and sheep brought by European settlers. They became popular targets for hunters, who couldn’t resist bagging a bird with a nine-foot wing span, and for gold miners, who cut open their quills and poured gold dust inside for safekeeping. The Grand Canyon population dwindled, and after the sighting near Williams, Ariz., in 1924, the condor disappeared from the Southwest.

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The idea of sending California condors to live in the Grand Canyon was first broached at the agency in 1990, but the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service waited to start planning a release until last year, when its program to save the giant bird from extinction seemed on solid ground.

Since 1987, when the last wild condor was captured and placed in captivity, the numbers of birds has nearly quadrupled, from 28 to 103 this year.

There have been some setbacks--between 1992 and 1994 six condors released in Ventura County died from various causes, including ingesting antifreeze and electrocution from hitting power lines--but since then 17 birds have been successfully returned to more remote areas of Los Padres National Forest.

Many others are being prepared for release, a lengthy process that includes aversion therapy to ensure that the condors consider humans unpleasant company. Mesta said nine birds from the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos have been selected for the Vermilion Cliffs release and are ready to be set free.

“They should have been let out earlier,” he said. “They are past the age and we need the room in the captive breeding facility.”

From the beginning, the agency had hoped to dodge anti-endangered species sentiment by releasing the birds under a Reagan-era amendment to the Endangered Species Act called Section 10J. That amendment allows the agency to declare some of the birds genetically unnecessary to perpetuate the species.

Because the Southern California captive breeding program is going so well, the Fish & Wildlife Service could take that liberty with a few birds and simultaneously avoid some of the hassle that comes with species protection, relaxing the fears of those who believe endangered species is a synonym for government interference.

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In theory, the condor could soar over the Southwest without hampering ranching operations, tourism, mining, lumbering or any other industry.

But as Mesta found, it wasn’t that easy.

Opposition came not only from people who didn’t buy that theory, but also from environmentalists who believed the nonessential status left the birds too vulnerable.

The Defenders of Wildlife found it “difficult philosophically and emotionally” to see condors released without full protection of the act. And some residents, such as Lester Wood of Cedar City, Utah, worried that the birds could be killed.

“We have a serious problem in southern Utah with sportsmen who shoot anything that moves,” Wood wrote. “I get a bad sinking feeling when I think of such large targets and condors in local skies.”

Mesta said he isn’t concerned about that possibility, mainly because he thinks the hostilities have already been worked out with the locals. Lately he has even started to get some calls apologizing for the negativism toward the condor.

“Once you get to know these folks they are nice,” Mesta said. “This has been a real learning experience for me. What I find most disturbing is that the general public has such a mistrust of the federal government. We must have done something to bring it to this point.”