Welfare State for Vultures

Deep in the Los Padres National Forest, where plunging canyons meet towering sandstone pinnacles, the first in a new generation of California condors toddles around a small cave, flapping its stubby wings.

Across the valley, biologist Mike Barth peers through a telescope.

“My nightmare,” he says, squinting in the sun, “is that chick will take its first flight up that canyon and right into a power line.”

The chick, the first condor brooded and hatched in the wild in 18 years, represents the most significant breakthrough in the 23-year, $35-million effort to save North America’s largest bird from extinction.

“My high point was the hatching of that chick, but it keeps me up at night,” said Bruce Palmer, coordinator of the condor project for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It’s the yin and yang of the condor dilemma.”

For the hundreds of biologists, volunteers and academics who have spent years trying to keep condors a living symbol of America’s primordial past, success has often been followed by disaster and disappointment. But even those accustomed to expecting the worst are feeling a bit giddy these days.

After the first chick hatched in April, another was born in May and a third in June. California condors, once largely confined to rugged areas of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, now roam Big Sur and large swaths of Arizona, including the Grand Canyon. They have also alighted in the San Bernardino Mountains near Crestline and soared with hang gliders over the San Fernando Valley.

In September, six condors will be freed in Baja California, with later releases scheduled for New Mexico and Pinnacles National Monument near Salinas. Plans also call for freeing condors near historic foraging areas of Riverside and San Diego counties.

Meanwhile, the condor population has grown from a low of 22 birds to 205, with 44 eggs laid since January. Condors are now bred in Boise, Idaho, the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos and, beginning next year, the Oregon Zoo in Portland. The overall goal is two populations of 150 birds each in California and Arizona by 2020.

“We have hit some critical landmarks,” said Mike Mace, curator of birds at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and a member of the California Condor Recovery Team. “We rescued a species from extinction and we have bred birds in captivity who are now raising their own offspring.”

The California condor, weighing up to 25 pounds with wings stretching nearly 10 feet across, once shared a continent with woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats.

Experts say they are intelligent, highly social and intensely curious animals, more akin to primates than birds. But these hulking, red-eyed vultures remained largely a mystery to scientists in the early days of the recovery program.

New Approach

They often misread behavior patterns and underestimated the threat of urban surroundings. Birds were released only to be recaptured after landing in schoolyards or on power poles. Others died of lead poisoning, electrocution and collisions.

In response, the hands-off approach was replaced by an intensive management style that left little to chance, creating a sort of avian welfare state where even the eggs were coddled.

Eggs are kept in state-of-the-art incubators. Chicks are monitored by hidden cameras in nesting boxes. Teams of biologists track the released condors’ every move. Condors that get too close to humans are recaptured for behavior modification. Calf carcasses are supplied to keep them from eating poisoned carrion, and every six months the birds are tested for lead.

“As they recover, we can take them out of intensive care,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton. “We still don’t have huge numbers and we need to be careful. But all the trends now are positive.”

Yet for all the recent successes, a self-sustaining condor population is nowhere in sight. And with no concentrated effort to replace lead bullets, which condors frequently ingest from carcasses, extinction would be certain without the avian nanny state.

“You can get a lot of birds out there, but that’s not success,” said Noel Snyder, one of the early leaders of the program and now its chief critic. “You don’t just throw birds back into the same environment they couldn’t live in before. If you haven’t solved the lead issue, they will dwindle down to nothing again. Then what have you accomplished?”

Victims of Change

Condors have never been plentiful, and as early as 1890 naturalists were calling it a “doomed bird.”

Over the next three decades, they vanished from much of Southern California, including the Santa Ynez and Santa Monica mountains, according to a 1953 study by zoologist Carl Koford.

Their disappearance was tied to a changing landscape. Condors, which can live more than 50 years and soar to 15,000 feet, once feasted on the thousands of cattle that died each year on sprawling ranches. But as crops replaced cows, hunters shot and poisoned the birds, collectors stole their eggs and cowboys sometimes lassoed them for sport.

In response, the Sespe Condor Sanctuary was established in 1947 on 37,000 acres near Fillmore. In 1953, it became illegal to kill or capture condors and, in 1965, the Audubon Society hired John Borneman as the first “condor warden.”

Borneman monitored the birds, fed them frozen carcasses and kept out the egg poachers.

“You could get $300 for a condor egg,” he said. “They were in such demand they would paint a swan’s egg green and pass it off as a condor egg.”

Working without modern radio transmitters, early naturalists spent weeks in the wilderness chasing down condors.

Condor biologist Janet Hamber once watched as a colleague climbed into a nest to measure a condor chick.

“They were trying to put the chick in a container, but it was too big,” she said. “Then I saw them lay the bird down and try to give it water, but it had died. There was too much stress on it.”

Hamber also witnessed one old matriarch’s slow death from lead poisoning.

“I watched her plod up a trail, get to the top and take off,” she said. “She landed near a calf carcass. I thought she was all right because she was eating big pieces of flesh. They later trapped her and found she had major lead poisoning.”

Defining Moment

By 1982, there were just a handful of condors remaining. Plans were made to bring the chicks and eggs into a captive breeding program at the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos. But when seven birds suddenly died and others showed high levels of lead in their blood, Fish and Wildlife decided to capture all the wild condors.

Environmentalists opposed the plan, fearing that the birds would remain in captivity and their habitat lost. After a court battle, in which Fish and Wildlife was represented by its then-associate solicitor Gale Norton, the government prevailed. In 1985, the capture program began in earnest.

Using cannon-powered nets and pit traps, biologists began capturing the condors. One day in 1987, Hamber spotted Adult Condor 9, or AC9, the last wild condor. He was standing near a calf carcass. She considered not calling a trapper.

“I sat there and thought, ‘Nobody would ever know. How would they know?’ Tomorrow was Easter Sunday. How would they get a crew together?” she asked herself. In the end, Hamber drove to a gas station and called the trapper, who arrived at 4:30 a.m.

“They got AC9 with a net,” she recalled. “It was agonizing to watch him walk up to it. There were puffs of smoke from the cannons and someone yelled ‘Yahoo!’ and I said, ‘How can you be happy about this?’ I looked at AC9 and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I said if the zoos didn’t eventually release those birds, I would.”

When Borneman heard there were no more California condors in the wild, he shut his office door and cried.

After thousands of years, the condor had finally vanished from the skies. But then scientists set to work to breed them in zoos.

A technique called double clutching was discovered to get multiple eggs. Condors lay one egg and raise one chick every two years. But if the egg is removed, they lay another within 30 days. If that one is removed, a condor will often lay a third egg. The eggs were placed in incubators and the adults given phony eggs to tend. When the eggs were close to hatching, they were returned to the nests so the adults could raise the chicks.

The practice goes on today in a remote corner of the Los Angeles Zoo, off limits to all but condor staff.

Signs urging “Quiet” hang everywhere. Shoes must be dipped in disinfectant before one steps into the incubator rooms. Eggs are handled with rubber gloves and sterile towels. If room temperatures fluctuate, alarms go off.

Constant Watch

“These are California condors and we can’t afford to lose any,” said animal keeper Michael Clark, who watches each chick on a television monitor. If an adult gets rough with a baby, the chick is quickly removed. Adults have killed chicks.

Double clutching has meant a surplus of chicks and not enough adults to raise them. The solution has been to use puppets resembling adult condors to play parent.

Clark puts the puppet on, hides behind a drape and nudges the chick to eat its chopped mice. He also preens and strokes the bird.

“We push for as many parent-reared birds as possible and try to avoid puppet-rearing, because the chicks tend to be more confident without it,” he said. Before their release, young condors spend time in large pens with “mentor birds” who show the juveniles how to behave.

When they are mature enough, the condors are fitted with radio transmitters, given a number and released in the Ventana Wilderness of Big Sur, the Vermilion Cliffs in Arizona or the Sespe Condor Sanctuary.

“It still blows me away,” Clark said. “They look like they come from another world. I don’t think anyone who has ever seen such an amazing animal up close would want to see it die out.”

When the birds are released, biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service take over daily management.

Ground Zero

Ground zero for the Ventura County team is an old ranch house deep in the Los Padres National Forest. Here they spend up to 10 days at a time in spartan conditions, sleeping in tiny cubicles and on call 24 hours a day.

Every morning they are dispatched to monitor condor nests, track their 35 birds, scour area ranches for dead calf donations or chase birds from oil pads.

Crises can erupt. Sometimes condors won’t eat or they simply disappear. A week after the first chick was born, its father dipped his head in a puddle of oil and brushed the chick with it. Both birds survived, but not before causing panic all the way up to the Interior secretary’s office.

On a recent morning, Mike Barth stood atop a 4,000-foot ridge pointing an antenna toward the sky. A condor appeared overhead, then four more. The biologist’s transmitter sounded a series of staccato beeps.

“Condor!” he yelled, scribbling the number of each bird, the time and direction of flight in a weathered notebook. “We try to account for all birds every day, but sometimes you can’t.”

More condors dipped over the ridge, their black wings, orange heads and white under markings stark against the deep blue sky. One perched on a rocky outcropping while AC9--the last condor captured in the wild and released in May--landed in a gnarled black walnut tree.

With each sighting, the adrenaline rose. Biologists strung across mountaintops from Fillmore to the San Fernando Valley radioed in condor sightings and identification numbers. Despite a long day of near 100-degree heat, their passion for condors never cooled.

“The people in this program get so into it,” said biologist Bronwyn Davey as the sun set over the golden hills. “The condors become like friends. You get to know them individually, get to know their personalities.”

Back at the ranch house, conversation rarely strayed from the quirks, habits and general plight of the birds.

The group discussed the continuing threat posed by lead and the views of program critic Noel Snyder, who thinks all the birds should be brought back into captivity until the environment is made safe.

“Snyder’s idea is too extreme,” said Allan Mee, a researcher from the San Diego Zoo studying condor nesting and parenting behavior. “I understand his viewpoint, though. In most introductions [back into the wild], you don’t start until the danger is out of the environment.”

“I do believe that unless the lead problem is solved, we won’t be able to maintain a wild, free-flying condor population,” said Bruce Palmer, program coordinator.

There are serious efforts to produce non-lead ammunition. Steel shot has replaced lead for hunting waterfowl. And advertising campaigns are underway to persuade hunters to bury the innards of animals killed with lead bullets.

Hope for Future

Given the threats, rigorous management of the California condor will likely continue. Scientists hope a new generation raised in the wild will overcome the obstacles it faces and once again soar over its ancient habitat.

“The skies are different for me now because I have seen condors,” said Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo who works with the birds. “Will it be OK for the condor? It will take a few generations to make a prognosis. Can people make a difference? Absolutely.”

For more condor photos and video, go to www.latimes.comcondor.