Is This Bird Worth $20 Million?

Mark Vekasy steered the Ford pickup to the top of the rought road, parked on the crest and stepped onto the crimson-colored dirt of northern Arizona. Off to the east, the huge Navajo Indian Reservation that sprawls across three states poured into a wide red valley dotted with sagebrush. Mesas and buttes cut sharp silhouettes on the horizon. In the middle of this vastness, the tall chimneys of a tribal power plant fumed white smoke into the endless sky. Off to the west, the improbable blue of water filled the countless coves and canyons of Lake Powell.

The land and the sky stagger the imagination: The cracked and tilted earth brings forth hundreds of millions of years of geology at a glance and mocks the human life span. The sheer scale of the landscape is enormous. So is Vekasy’s task.

The 34-year-old biologist’s job is to shepherd the California condor back from the brink of extinction and into the wild once again. Last December, scientists embarked upon the final phase of an ambitious effort to get the condor off nature’s death row by starting a flock of the birds amid the scarlet crags of Vermilion Cliffs, southwest of Lake Powell, a thousand feet above the desert floor where the Colorado River begins to carve the Grand Canyon and where the great bird soared during the last Ice Age. And now one of Vekasy’s birds was missing.

Like some sort of ancient mystic trying to conjure rain from the heavens, Vekasy raised a rod to the sky. Holding the aluminum antenna above his head, he pressed a radio scanner against his chest and dialed in the frequency he had been searching for: Condor 51. Each condor released into the wild wears two radio transmitters: one mounted to a tail feather, another pierced underneath a wing. The day before another biologist had lost track of the bird.

Condor 51 (short for 151) was one of 135 of its kind in the world, the fruit of decades of hard work to keep the virtually extinct bird from sliding into oblivion. The 11-month-old condor, born at the Los Angeles Zoo, was one of the bolder birds in the nine-bird flock, a strong flier who could dominate a carcass and had pushed the boundaries of the flock’s range east of Lake Powell, some 30 miles from the release site at Vermilion Cliffs.

Vekasy got a strong beep. He started to walk. The beeping grew louder as he approached an electrical tower draping high-tension power lines across the desert. Under the line was an abandoned refrigerator. A terrible thought seized Vekasy: someone shot Condor 51 and stuffed the body of the largest bird in North America into the discarded icebox like so much leftover chicken. Then he found the tail feather, a ratty, foot-long black quill with a thumb-sized transmitter still attached. Birds lose feathers all the time.

Switching to the wing transmitter, Vekasy followed the signal for more than a mile to a rocky outcrop. There he found the body by a clump of rabbit brush. A sad path of prints from the creature’s 9-foot wings trailed back to the rock where the bird had struggled before dying; both legs were broken, a stripe across the femurs showing where the bird had clipped the power line before flying the final mile of its short life.

Vekasy picked up the 20-pound body and carried it back to his truck. He drove to the town of Page and at Wal-Mart purchased a large cooler, a garbage bag and ice to ship the bird to San Diego for a necropsy the next day. Then he headed south, slipping through a cleft in the red rock of Echo Cliffs, descending onto a flat plain of scrub land, dipping into a small fissure in the desert to cross the Colorado River and wind up at a lonely motel deep in the late-afternoon shadows of Vermilion Cliffs, where Condor 51 had soared into the wild six months earlier.

*

It has been a decade since the last free-flying California condor was snatched from a dry hill in Kern County and hauled to the San Diego Wild Animal Park in a desperate and highly controversial bid to save the species from extinction. The Condor Recovery Program is one of the most expensive, contentious and heart-wrenching efforts that man has ever undertaken to make amends to nature. By raw numbers, the effort has been a success: In captivity, scientists have quadrupled the birthrate of the slow-breeding vulture and increased by fivefold its population, at 134 since the death of Condor 151. In 1992, the program began returning the birds to the wild, where 28 of them live in two flocks in California and Arizona. Establishing the birds at Vermilion Cliffs near the Grand Canyon is the latest step on what scientists hope will be a relatively short road to declaring victory in the long fight to save the condor.

But fundamental questions have still not been answered: Can a Pleistocene vulture thrive in a world of high-tension power lines? Can zoo-raised animals that might always depend on humans for their food be considered wild? Is a bird that even its defenders agree is marginally viable in the modern world the best candidate for such a heroic rescue effort?

Answering these questions will not be cheap. Since the Condor Recovery Plan was first drawn up in 1974, as required by the passage of the landmark Endangered Species Act the previous year, somewhere in the vicinity of $20 million has been spent to save a buzzard whose typical dinner entree of mastodon carcass vanished 10,000 years ago. This year alone the recovery program expects to spend about $2 million on breeding condors and reintroducing them to the wild--where the zoo-raised fledglings have previously lapped up antifreeze, proved to be such lousy fliers that one needed a lift to the top of a cliff in a truck and have demonstrated a deadly affinity for flying into power lines and poles, the avian equivalent of mosquitoes zipping straight for the bug zapper. And over the next 18 years, when the recovery team hopes that the bird can graduate from its endangered status to merely threatened, the plan projects spending another $30 million or so. Which brings the price tag on saving the condor in the neighborhood of $50 million.

“It’s an expensive proposition,” admits Robert Mesta, who coordinates the recovery program for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service out of its Ventura office, “but you couldn’t buy one stealth bomber for that. If you divide the price by the number of birds, it’s a lot, but if you look at what it costs each taxpayer, it’s almost nothing.”

The condor is the poster bird of the government’s endangered species program. More than 1,000 plants and animals are currently on the endangered rolls--twice the number that are estimated to have been wiped out in the first two centuries of American history. In fiscal 1994, the last year for which figures are available, the U.S. government doled out almost $30 million for recovery programs, of which $600,000 went to condors--the other two-thirds of the money spent on the bird annually comes from private sources, such as the Los Angeles Zoo, the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Peregrine Fund. Wolves and the spotted owl got even more federal money.

Saving species isn’t easy. In the quarter of a century since the act committed the federal government to halt a massive die-off of life forms, only 11 species have recovered enough to be removed from the list; seven vanished from the face of the earth. In 1995, the bald eagle was down-listed to threatened and the Fish and Wildlife Service is hoping to move such other high-profile birds as the peregrine falcon, the brown pelican and the Aleutian Canada goose down a step as well.

At the same time, the service has another 183 species it is considering for the list, and 40% of those already cataloged as endangered await recovery plans. All of which comes at a time when developers, ranchers and recreational land users cringe at the mention of endangered species and politicians and private citizens had lined up to keep the condor out of the Southwest. To the suspicious residents of southern Utah and northern Arizona, the prospect of a federally protected prehistoric bird soaring overhead is as welcome as government helicopters hovering above their backyards. “Restrictions on mining, grazing, recreation, utility lines, access roads, etc. will follow, and eventually every facet of our lives will be touched in one way or another,” wrote Garfield County, Utah, Commissioner Louise Liston.

Even bird lovers aren’t sure that saving the condor is worth the cost. “I can still remember my first sighting of a California condor,” says R.J. Smith, a senior environmental scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, a public policy group. “In the Sespe (Condor Sanctuary) 20 years ago. Watching this great remnant of the Pleistocene age just hanging in the air was a very moving experience. But given the fact that we can’t save every species, the question is triage.

“It’s been a hell of a lot of money. It’s a very expensive program. There are other species that could probably coexist much more easily with man. There’s very little intelligence directed at what should we save and how should we save it. And that’s the question no one is asking about the condor.

“It’s always going to be a welfare critter, albeit a spectacular and very noble welfare critter. You’re constantly going to be manipulating those birds. How wild will they be?”

Mark Palmer thinks the program is also misguided, but for a completely different reason. Palmer works for the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, the conservation group founded by firebrand environmentalist David Brower, one of the most vocal critics of the captive breeding program.

“I see it has a green-washing type of effort,” says Palmer. “We’re just putting condors back into the wild environment where they don’t survive without fixing what was wrong in the environment. The environmental hazards that caused the problem in the first place are still there.

“Throwing out condors into the wild, feeding them, these are artificial measures to maintain the bird; it’s a zoo without bars. They went extinct for a reason in Arizona and putting them back there doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

*

“The glide of a condor is different from any other movement of nature,” wrote Ian McMillan in his 1968 book, “Man and the California Condor.” In fact, the condor can soar for an hour without having to flap its wings. To the Indians of California, these wings caused thunder, held the heavens aloft and ferried the souls of the dead to the next realm. “So gentle a ghoul,” marveled ornithologist William Dawson.

Ten years ago, the last gentle ghoul in the wild traced languid circles in the sky over the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, southwest of Bakersfield. The bird was known by the biologists watching from their hiding places as AC-9 (adult condor). Ten months earlier they had snatched the bird’s mate, AC-8, and before that had plucked the pair’s only egg from their nest on the side of a cliff. Then they took away the social bird’s last companion, AC-5, while AC-9 watched from a tree. For nearly two months the last wild condor slipped through their fingers.

Finally, on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1987, AC-9 alighted near a carcass put out as bait, warily hopped over and lowered its pink head for feeding when a boom sounded, a 50-foot net shot through the air and the biologists sprang from their camouflage. The last condor to fly in the skies of North America was pushed into a plastic dog kennel.

Once the great bird flew over much of the continent, from New York to Florida, from Mexico to Canada, dining on the carcasses of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. But then, during the late Pleistocene, ice sheets covering North America crept back north, mammalian mega-fauna died off and the condor’s range shrank to a thick ribbon along the Pacific coast, awash in marine carrion before seals and whales were hunted toward extermination.

In 1602, a Spanish friar jotted down the first recorded condor sighting near Monterey, where a group of black birds was pecking at a whale carcass. In 1805, Lewis and Clark observed condors--”the beautiful buzzard of the Columbia”--flocking above the cascades at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon, where spawning salmon were dying in droves. They shot three. “A doomed bird,” surgeon-turned-zoologist J.G. Cooper concluded in 1890. By this century, the condor’s range had withered to a V-shaped tract of land with its base in Fillmore, one prong of the V stretching north to Visalia and the other to Monterey.

It was into the chaparral-covered back-country near Fillmore that a young Berkeley graduate student named Carl Koford moved into a cave in 1939 and spent three years watching condors. A meticulous researcher famed for once spending 42 days in a tree observing ground squirrels, Koford took 3,500 pages of notes and became the world’s most revered condor expert. Koford, who in the years before his death in 1979 was given to spreading his arms in the aisles of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and imitating the glide of a condor, was the first to try to count the birds, putting their number at about 60 in the 1940s--a much-disputed estimate.

Koford argued that if man left the bird alone but protected its habitat, nature would take care of the rest. By 1947, more than 35,000 acres west of I-5 in the Los Padres National Forest had been turned into the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, but the bird still seemed to be gliding toward extinction. In 1952, biologists at the San Diego Zoo--where the California bird’s closest cousin, the Andean condor, was already producing offspring--obtained a permit from the state to snare condors to breed in captivity. Condors are well adapted to a sparse range--a single egg every other year--but not so well evolved for survival in a world where they are shot at or eat carrion filled with toxic lead bullets. By taking eggs and nestlings away from their parents, the San Diego biologists hoped to prod the animals into reproducing faster in the zoo than they would in nature; eventually they would return the fledglings to the wild.

Koford and his supporters were furious. They compared the bird to an environmental barometer that indicated the whole ecosystem was in serious trouble; some even contended that more could be learned by letting the condor die in the wild than by saving it in zoos. “A released bird,” Koford later sneered, “is only half a bird.” The permit was revoked.

In 1980, the Condor Recovery Team (“those bastards,” McMillan called them) finally won permission to take birds from the wild for captive breeding. One chick died while being handled, and by 1982 no more than 23 condors existed. Eggs gathered from nests began to hatch in zoos and the condor population seemed to be rebounding. Then, in the winter of 1984-85, six birds disappeared from the California skies. The team decided it had no choice but to bring in the last nine birds. The Audubon Society sued unsuccessfully to stop the roundup.

AC-9 was plucked from a hill in Kern County and driven to the San Diego Wild Animal Park--not the Los Angeles Zoo as originally planned because protesters there were chaining themselves to the front entrance, causing bird curator Michael Wallace to sleep on top of a breeding pen in case activists tried to liberate Gymnogyps californianus.

Five years later, on the morning of Jan. 14, 1992, two fledgling California condors and a pair of their Andean cousins awoke in an artificial cave to find the net that had kept them on a 150-foot cliff in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary for three months was gone. One, the daughter of AC-9, was called Xewe (pronounced Ga-wee); the other California bird was named Chocuyens (Cho-koo-yenz). While scientists and reporters watched from a nearby ridge named after Carl Koford, the birds hoped around the chaparral. A gust of wind blew one of the Andean condors off the cliff; it landed in an oak tree. The first California condor flight was less dramatic: Xewe jumped atop a boulder and flew 90 feet to another rock. One abyss, it seemed, had been crossed.

Condors, it turns out, are easier to catch than to release. In 1967, an emaciated yearling condor was found in the Topa Topa Mountains above Ojai, treated at the Los Angeles Zoo and released. The young bird was then beaten up by other condors in a carcass fight, disappeared and was found three days later tangled up in a tree and looking like carrion itself. Zookeepers decided the bird (they named it Topa Topa) was unfit for the wild and took it back to Los Angeles, where it became tame as a parrot. “He loved people,” says Wallace.

When Topa Topa became mature around the age of 6, he tried to mate with his keeper, then made do with a bush in his cage instead. In 1985, when he was 17, the zoo gave Topa Topa an adult female; he got his butt kicked. A second female was no more friendly. The zoo then gave him a young female, but when it came time to consummate the relationship, Topa Topa went back to the bush again. Finally, zookeepers slipped the couple an Andean condor egg to hatch, hoping that Topa Topa would learn to interact more naturally with his own kind. Since then, the 31-year-old bird (condors have been known to live into their 40s) has produced six offspring.

Released condors are often their own worst enemies. They soar with hang gliders. They land at picnic grounds and poke around ice coolers. They chew the covers off of grills. They get sick after eating hot dogs and popcorn given out by campers. “They tame down really quickly--they’re intelligent, sociable and curious,” says Wallace. “That’s the problem.”

Chocuyens, with Xewe the first captive-born California condors released into the Sespe refuge, was found dead nine months later of kidney failure after lapping up sweet and syrupy antifreeze. The following year, a captive-born condor collided with a power line, sending 17,000 volts through its body. Two weeks later, another condor died after flying into a power line; a fourth bird was killed after also clipping a line. In less than two years, half of the eight birds sent into the wild at Sespe were dead. The other four were recaptured.

Wild-born condors never did stuff like this, but the older birds that would normally demonstrate appropriate behavior are doing stud service in the captive-breeding program. And biologists, concerned about the possible effects of inbreeding, are reluctant to let the zoo gene pool get any smaller by letting mature birds loose.

So scientists devised an aversion therapy program for young birds. Zoo-raised chicks were always fed by keepers using condor hand puppets, but now the nestlings are also raised in fake caves in the back-country. Biologists bum-rush the birds and turn them upside down so that they learn to fear humans. And recently, chicks have been returned to their parents to rear, which slows down the reproductive cycle but seems to produce a more cautious bird.

Power lines are more tricky. These days, young condors find fake power poles in their cages, which give off a mild shock to discourage the birds from roosting on the real thing in the wild. But power lines cross even the most isolated stretches of land and act as giant trip wires for all kinds of large birds. Utility companies, which participated in a recent conference on birds and power lines at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, are experimenting with markers and other methods of making lines more visible. “But,” says Wallace, “we can swamp that mortality issue with more birds.”

That kind of thinking drives people like the National Audubon Society’s Jesse Grantham up the wall. To Grantham, the recovery team is trying to make the bird safe for the land instead of making the land safe for the bird--and everything else in the ecosystem. “That’s placing the burden of guilt on the condor,” he says. “There’s more to this than just the blood, guts and feathers of condors; there are land-use issues, and many other species besides condors that are affected. We should be using the condor in California to do a lot of things. The condor can drive a much longer effort to help a variety of endangered species. You can’t change an animal and make it fit into a man-altered environment. You have to deal with the problem.”

Which, in turn, strikes Mesta, the condor coordinator, as unrealistic. “Condors can fly 100 miles a day in any direction,” he says. “You can’t turn all of California and Arizona into a preserve for condors. We have to integrate the condors into current land use. You don’t want to alienate those folks out there or you won’t get the support you need. You have to accept a little higher level of risk than you might normally want to, but that’s how you play the game.”

A week after Mark Vekasy find the body of Condor 51, he is driving a forest-green Ford F-150 with one hand, surfing the ruts on a washboard dirt road while fiddling with the knobs on the radio next to him. The truck starts to fishtail on a patch of gravel and Vekasy turns the steering wheel without lifting his eyes from the crackling scanner.

Vekasy is one of several biologist at Vermilion Cliffs working for the nonprofit Peregrine Fund. The organization, founded in 1970, pioneered the captive breeding and release of the peregrine falcon, once nearly extinct in the East because of DDT but now nesting in the canyons of Manhattan. The P-Fund, as it is known, is spending $600,000 a year on breeding condors at its Boise headquarters and releasing them in Arizona.

The first birds were released in December of last year--a year later than planned because of fierce local opposition, including a lawsuit and the threat of anti-condor legislation in Congress. The Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Arizona condors a nonessential experimental population to allay fears that the federal government would run roughshod over the property rights of residents. But in reality the Arizona colony is essential to the recovery program’s goal of establishing two geographically distinct populations of 150 birds each, while having a like number in captivity. At that point, perhaps in the second decade of the next century, the condor will move down from its long perch on the endangered species list and alight on the threatened rung--although humans might always be looking after them.

“The reality is that everything in the environment is going to have to be managed in some way because we’re taking over so much of the environment ourselves,” Mike Wallace says. “We’re only going to have bison, coyotes and condors if we want them. All of these require management. It takes some agency to find the answer where men and beast can live together. If we want it in the landscape, it will have to be managed.”

Which is why Mark Vekasy is waving a metal antenna around on a stormy May day, trying to pick up the fleeting radio signals of his birds. “I got two of ‘em,” he exults. “Thirty-six and fifty. They must be flying.”

Vekasy grew up in the Ohio countryside, has a master’s in biology and earns a living by spending his days driving roads from hell and listening to static. He once spent nine days in a van following red-tailed hawks from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. “We just want to make sure the birds are healthy and not getting into trouble,” he says.

That’s no easy task. Condor 42, an aggressive, fearless, solitary bird, found itself stuck on a windless day in the valley below Vermillion Cliffs. The biologists hauled the condor to the top the cliff in a truck. In January, the same condor disappeared and its body was found in some shrubs, killed by a puncture wound to the head, the result of a fight with an eagle. Then, in May, Condor 51 hit the power line.

Today Vekasy loses the signal of the birds he is tracking west of Lake Powell. A couple more hours bounce by on roads no car should ever meet. Finally, a low beep interrupts the static. We drive southeast of Lake Powell, onto the Navajo Indian Reservation, until the road ends near a yawning tributary of Lake Powell called Navajo Canyon. Across a red desert we scan the crannies of an ocher wall of rock on the far rim of the canyon and see nothing. Vekasy slings the receiver over his shoulder and starts off in a long, straight stride over rocks, past brilliant cactus flowers and through prickly underbrush. At a steep cliff, Vekasy barely slows before he starts climbing down, one hand clutching rocks, the other still holding the antenna.

We cross several miles of red sandstone, an awesomely shifting landscape of rock, thick ridges of flaky shale jutting crazily out of smooth earth that fades to pink and peach by the time we reach the canyon rim. Somewhere around here, Vekasy tells me in translating the strong beeps, are Condors 50 and 33--maybe even on the cliff just below us. And somewhere a little farther off, always pushing the envelope, is Condor 36.

Aided by radio telemetry and an expert tracker, I’ve spent the entire day looking for the big birds without catching a glimpse of one. But the next day, after making the tortuous trip to the top of the cliffs, I watch a group of condors feed on the 100-pound carcass of a stillborn calf. The locals are already growing accustomed to seeing large shadows cross the highway and, even in these great spaces, the two species are not far apart. Man and the condor will meet again. That will be the true test of the condor recovery program.

At our feet the canyon winds and yawns, lazy blue water reflecting the sky deep below. It’s an inspiring, primordial sight. Then I see the sandy beach in the cove to the left, packed with enough houseboats, jet skis and speedboats to form a small navy. Picnic stuff is strewn about. A motorboat cuts the silence, drones through the canyon directly below us and disappears, replaced only by a fading wake and the wind. “I hope,” Vekasy says finally, “we don’t hear from tourists that they were feeding hot dogs to condors.”