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CALIFORNIA WILD

FEATURE STORY

In The Company Of Condors

Phil McKenna

On a cool November night, biologist Mike Wallace is standing 60 feet off the ground on a branch of a Jeffrey pine. Just out of his reach, a newly released California condor that has been eluding recapture prepares to escape farther into the wilds of Baja California. Things have gone from bad to worse in this attempt to bring the largest land bird in North America back to Mexico after a 70-year absence. A skeleton field crew, territorial golden eagles, and inaccessible backcountry have all conspired to thwart the endangered vulture’s return.

As head of the California Condor Recovery Team, an advisory group to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), Wallace has been struggling for weeks to lure the big fledgling back to safety. He dropped meat on half a dozen ridgelines in one night. When that failed, he and Juan Vargas, head of the Baja release site, spent the next few nights chasing the bird from roost to roost. Despite their best efforts, the bird only flew deeper into the 243-square-mile Sierra San Pedro Martir National Park.

Now the 53-year-old Wallace is exhausted. His graying beard stinks like the rotting dog he uses as bait. Yet his eyes still flash from beneath his weatherbeaten sombrero.

Fueled by desperation, Wallace makes a blind lunge at the 20-pound bird the instant before it takes flight. He grabs a leg, then loses his footing as the bird flaps its powerful wings. Suspended upside down by his safety harness with the giant vulture tearing at his shins, Wallace somehow manages to loop a noose around the bird’s legs and lower it to safety.

In some ways, it’s a miracle that Wallace and the condors have made it this far. As a graduate student, Wallace nearly became an Andean condor’s next meal when floods washed out his Peruvian field station and took the lives of several friends. Meanwhile, the California condor, the species he hoped to help recover, was dying at an alarming rate. In the winter of 1984-85, six out of 15 remaining wild condors died before biologists could get approval to bring them into captivity. When Wallace and FWS biologists finally released the first captive-bred condors in 1992, the excessively tame birds had to be quickly recaptured after landing in a campground and following campers into the outhouse.

The indefatigable Wallace now faces his most challenging mission yet. He is leading biologists in the U.S. and Mexico in an effort to reintroduce California condors to the remote Sierra San Pedro Martir of northern Baja California. At the same time, he and others must defend the giant birds from their most dangerous modern enemy—lead poisoning.

After the treetop rescue, Wallace and his crew regrouped the next spring to successfully release three condors in May of 2003. Two weeks after the release I catch Wallace resupplying in San Diego, and join him for a trip to the San Pedros. I had first met Wallace two years earlier while volunteering with the Ventana Wilderness Society, a group releasing condors in Big Sur, California. Wallace had come to Big Sur to get some ideas for a new release site he was then planning in Mexico and ended up giving me a crash course in basic condor behavior.

Ten miles from the release site, a map on the wall of the National Observatory of Mexico shows Earth at night as seen from space. Southern California from Los Angeles to San Diego shines like one giant headlight. South of the U.S.-Mexico border, however, the Baja Peninsula is a black void, as dark and undeveloped as the Amazon or the Australian outback.

One of the last historic sightings of condors south of the border as one shot in 1932 by then 13-year-old Phil Meling. Today Meling’s nephews are helping to bring the species back by hosting biologists and their release site in the mountains above the family ranch.

Hidden in an old growth pine forest of the San Pedros, the release site consists of a flight pen half the size of a basketball court where captive-bred chicks acclimate to their new surroundings. A 20-foot-high canopy of netting keeps the birds from leaving prematurely. Outside the pen is a water bath and the desiccated remains of a stillborn calf—a recent meal provided for free-flying condors. Observation blinds attached to both pens and a nearby trailer camp allow Wallace and a team of four Mexican biologists to keep a close eye on the birds.

The crew fans out each morning on foot, ATV, and 4x4. Throughout the day they use radio telemetry and spotting scopes to triangulate the birds’ positions. Each condor carries a transmitter and a large numbered tag on each wing. This morning, Wallace tries to get a fix on condor 220, a new release that has been stuck in a canyon for over a week.

“You always focus on the weakest bird,” Wallace says. “Right now, 220’s case is critical. They can go 30 days without feeding, but it’s her inability to find water that concerns me most. The San Pedros are such a hot, dry place, a newly released bird won’t make it more than 15 days without water.”

No sooner has Wallace finished speaking than his radio crackles with the voice of team biologist Catalina Porras. “You can relax, Mike,” Porras says. “I’ve got your gal, 220, circling overhead—looks like she’s cleared the canyon and is coming in to feed.”

A moment later Wallace points to a silhouette so massive that it momentarily eclipses the sun. I hear the rush of nine-foot wings ripping through the wind as the young Gymnogyps californianus soars just above the treeline.

Gymnogyps, or “the naked vulture,” relies on keen eyesight and an ability to fly high and fast as it searches for carrion. It will often follow turkey vultures to a carcass. Its natural diet would include the remains of large animals such as deer, elk, bighorn sheep, and coyote, as well as whale and sea lion along the coast.

The recent release of condors in Baja is only the latest chapter in a long history of efforts to save the species.

As early as 1905, the California Legislature banned the collection of condor eggs. But such measures did little to protect the species. By 1982, only 22 condors remained. In a last-ditch effort to save the birds, FWS decided to trap and place all wild condors in a captive breeding program.

The capture plan met intense opposition from environmentalists. Archdruid David Brower, Friends of the Earth founder, said human manipulation would only hasten the bird’s demise, and pleaded for a “death with dignity.” The National Audubon Society feared removing the birds from the wild would doom their habitat to development. Bowing to political pressure, FWS temporarily suspended meetings of its Recovery Team.

On January 9, 1986 Audubon obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting the remaining birds’ capture. Nine days later, one of only six remaining wild condors died from lead poisoning. The death helped convince the court to permit condor trapping again that spring. Government biologists caught the last wild condor on Easter Sunday, 1987. It marked the first time in at least 40,000 years that condors did not fly over North America.

Destined for breeding facilities in Los Angeles, the condor was held for several weeks at the San Diego Zoo as environmentalists protested the bird’s capture in Los Angeles. “People were chaining themselves to the front gate,” Wallace remembers. “There was a lot of dissent, and understandably so; the United States government had never before taken a species out of the wild and successfully returned it.”

Wallace himself watched over the flock. “One night I had a bunch of Earth Firsters break into the zoo and start howling like wolves,” Wallace recalls, able now to laugh at the event. “I’m sitting there with my spotlight and a .22. I call security and say, ‘you guys better be up here quick ’cuz I’m not letting them touch these birds!’”

The intensity Wallace brings to his work stems from a lifetime of interacting with birds. He started training pigeons when he was seven. “I’d be coming home from school at lunchtime and would have 50 birds clouding around my head. I became known as ‘Bird Boy,’” he says.

After working at an animal rehabilitation center through college, Wallace donned a sport coat, ran a comb through his shoulder length hair, and took his animals on the road. Loading a beaver, a wolf, an owl, and several snakes into a Chevy van, he toured the Midwest presenting “Animal Adaptations” at over 300 high school assemblies per year.

Sleeping in parking lots with a van full of animals eventually got old. “I felt like I was just spewing facts. I wanted to discover something new,” Wallace says.

With a bit of luck and his trademark chutzpah, he got into graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. For his doctoral work, Wallace traveled to Peru to study Andean condors (Vultur gryphus), the California condor’s closest living relative. Because of their similarities, Wallace was able to test capture and release methods he later applied to the endangered California condor.

The release methods, telemetry tags, and feeding puppets developed by Wallace in the 1980s have become standard practice for raising California condors today.

At the same time, human meddling with the condors, so heavily criticized by environmentalists in the 1980s, has only increased.

In addition to numbered tags punched through its wings, every condor now has an identifying microchip embedded beneath its skin. Fledglings are subjected to behavior modification training to prepare them for life in an increasingly claustrophobic world. The training includes electric shocks when they land on mock power poles. Once released, the free-flying birds are kept supplied with clean food, and will continue to be fed until lead poisoning is no longer a threat.

Yet despite all the behavior modification, hidden cameras, spotting scopes, microchips, and remote telemetry, the birds remain elusive. In Arizona, where the Peregrine Fund is monitoring a flock of 36 free-flying condors, birds have been known to travel out of range for several months at a time. One flew as far as Wyoming. In one 12-month period, biologists in Arizona documented more than 70 instances in which the birds fed on animal carcasses they found on their own.

While biologists would normally encourage such independence, foraging has occasionally proven deadly for condors. In spring of 2000, three members of the Arizona flock died of lead poisoning after feeding on carcasses contaminated with lead shot. Nine of the remaining 22 condors had to be captured and treated. The birds were injected with lead chelators that stripped the toxin from their blood.

In August of 2002, another member of the Arizona flock died of lead poisoning after ingesting multiple bullet fragments. Again, nearly half of the remaining flock required emergency medical treatment.

Ingesting only a few fragments of a shattered bullet can kill a condor. Lead ammunition dissolves in their stomachs where toxic salts are absorbed into the bloodstream, paralyzing the gastrointestinal tract. Without immediate medical treatment, severely poisoned condors starve to death.

Physiologically, condors are no more sensitive to lead than any other bird. However their unique dining habits make them especially vulnerable to lead poisoning. Unlike birds of prey, condors feed in flocks. Just one contaminated carcass can harm a dozen or more birds. In fact, Wallace believes that the condors may be mistaking pieces of ammunition for the bone chips they depend on for calcium. The birds’ slow breeding pace only compounds the problem. A pair of condors usually raises only one chick every other year, making it difficult for the species to replenish its numbers.

According to Bruce Palmer, California condor recovery coordinator for FWS, lead poisoning poses the single biggest threat to the species’ long-term survival. “If we don’t solve the lead problem, reintroductions will never be fully successful,” Palmer says.

Success still seems far away. The California Department of Fish and Game estimates that, for the eight California counties within the condor range, nearly 29,000 coyote and wild pig carcasses—as well as 8,000 gut piles from deer—are left in the field annually.

To keep the condors healthy, FWS biologists place a constant supply of clean food around release sites. The bi-weekly ritual has continued since the Service first started reintroducing condors in southern California over a decade ago. Critics claim the food drops will end up taming a species that relies heavily on learned behavior.

As evening’s first stars appear, I help biologists Hugo Sotelo and Julio Cesar lash a rotting horse leg to the front of an ATV. Together, we board the four-wheeler and head toward the cliff face.

Approaching the drop site, Sotelo kills the motor and motions for us to untie the leg. “Keep your headlamp off and be quiet,” Cesar firmly reminds me. Free flying birds may be roosting in nearby trees. He doesn’t want them to associate us with the food they will find tomorrow.

We work together to haul the horsemeat around trees and over boulders. It’s brutal, nauseating work, complicated by darkness and fatigue. Yet when we reach the rim of the plateau and the leg is secured, I am awed by the silent grandeur of the shadowed ridgelines cascading towards the Pacific. “It’s so beautiful up here,” Sotelo whispers.

Back at camp, Wallace vents his frustration about the ongoing need for clean food drops, intensive monitoring, and emergency treatments for poisoned birds. “If nothing happens with lead, it’s going to continue to be a struggle to recover the species,” Wallace says. “Right now it’s a lot of effort, too much effort, to chelate them every few months. We can’t keep doing this forever.”

While biologists have known of the threat of lead poisoning in the condor’s range for years, FWS bureaucrats, steeled by past experience, have been reluctant to act on an issue that would upset hunters.

Hunters were already displeased by a 1991 ban on the use of lead shot in waterfowl hunting. Regulations against lead ammunition went into effect before shot manufacturers could come up with practical alternatives. The National Rifle Association viewed the ban as a thinly veiled attack on firearm freedoms, and vowed to fight until the mandate was overturned.

But as documented incidents of lead poisoning from ammunition in condors increase and, even more significantly, as good non-toxic ammunition alternatives emerge, hunters are beginning to change their attitudes toward the unrestricted use of lead ammunition.

In January of 2003, FWS invited hunters to join biologists to work out satisfactory solutions.

“I can’t stress enough how monumental this is,” said FWS’s Palmer, who is a member of the newly formed committee. “From the NRA on down, we’re working with the movers and shakers of the hunting industry. It’s very atypical of endangered species work to take a cooperative approach rather than mandating change through regulations, settlements, and lawsuits.”

In June, the committee asked hunters to help protect the endangered birds by burying animal remains or using slightly more expensive non-toxic ammunition.

Noel Snyder, former FWS biologist who led condor recovery efforts for much of the 1980s, questions the effectiveness of the new recommendations. “I think it’s a big first step, but it’s still a very timid approach,” says Snyder. “I’m very skeptical of the voluntary measures. It’s a lot of trouble to bury a carcass. I don’t think most people are going to do it.”

Palmer acknowledges the measures won’t stop all incidents of lead poisoning. “I’m aware that we will have more condor deaths in the next few years,” Palmer says. “But if we do need to take more aggressive measures in the future, the public will know our reasons and be more supportive.”

The report notes that if the education and voluntary actions are not successful within five to seven years, the committee may have to consider regulatory control.

Snyder chafes at the slow pace. “Another five to seven years means another $10 million dollars and we’re still no closer to self sustaining populations.”

To help ensure the condor’s survival, the recovery team plans to establish two separate wild populations of 150 birds each, and maintain a captive breeding pool of 75 more pairs.

With 124 birds now in captivity, the first goal is within sight. However, of the 161 birds released since 1992, only half remain in the wild. Human-related mortalities such as shooting and collisions with power lines—which together have claimed the lives of seven birds in three years—continue to impede the species’ recovery.

Late at night, after everybody else has gone to bed, Wallace is still seated at a picnic table working by lamplight. While most guys of his age and experience would have accepted administrative roles long ago, Wallace maintains an active presence in the field.

“It’s where I really feel alive, when I am out physically dealing with the challenges of conserving the species,” Wallace says. “Trying to get this behaviorally complex species to survive in the wild requires a lot of innovation and creativity and both stresses and stretches your own abilities.”

A month after the Baja recapture, forest fires forced Wallace to temporarily evacuate the release site and threatened to shut down the entire Mexican release project. But throughout their range, prospects for the condor are improving. In November, a pair of free-flying condors in Arizona successfully fledged the first chick to hatch in the wild since 1984. With 84 birds now flying over the Southwest, there are more condors in the wild than when the species was first extensively studied in the 1940s.

Still, not everyone is optimistic.

After a recent condor presentation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Trevor Swerdfager, Director General of the Canadian Wildlife Service asked Wallace, “Do you ever feel like just giving up?”

Wallace was clearly baffled. Obviously, giving up has never crossed his mind. Collecting himself, he looked Swerdfager directly in the eye and asked, “Why would you ever give up, when you know you’re going to win?”

Phil McKenna is a freelance writer living in Monterey, California.