Sophie Osborne pulled the garbage can with the carcass of the stillborn calf inside it out of the back of the pickup truck she’d parked near the edge of the Vermilion Cliffs. The can had a pair of shoulder straps attached to the side of it; Osborne grabbed them and swung the can up onto her back. Then she hustled off across a red plateau strewn with ankle-breaking rocks. From behind, it looked a bit like she was skipping.
Osborne is the Peregrine Fund biologist who took Shawn Farry’s place in the field, when he quit his job to work with Mike Wallace at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and then quit that job to work with monk seals in the South Pacific. Early in 2001, the first recorded California condor egg was produced in the wild since the last of the free-flying birds were trapped in the 1980s. It was a milestone the recovery team had been praying for since the released zoo-breds had gotten old enough to breed in the wild.
“I noticed that the pair of condors had stopped flying together and settled into a cave,” she said. “When one was foraging the other always stayed behind in the cave. When the foraging bird came back to the cave, its mate would fly away. When they alternate like that, it usually means they’re guarding an egg.”
Osborne began trembling when it dawned on her that she was almost certainly looking at an active condor nest site. News of the event shot through the recovery team like an electric power surge. Then the parent birds appeared to kill the egg. Osborne saw the parent condors fighting near the entrance to the cave one afternoon. One of them went inside and came back out a short time later with the egg impaled on its beak.
One year later, an Arizona breeding pair laid an egg in a cave inside the colossal rock formation called the Battleship in the heart of the Grand Canyon, while at least two other condor eggs were laid in California. A chick emerged from one of the eggs produced in California, but it died before it was old enough to fly. Spokesmen for the program said that they hadn’t expected the eggs to produce a fledgling, given that first attempts like these rarely added up to much.
So when Osborne and raptor expert Chad Olsen of the U.S. Park Service found another active nest cave the next year, they tried to keep their hopes in check. “The egg was in a part of the canyon called the Inferno,” Osborne said. “It’s a narrow drainage near Hopi Point with incredible red rock walls, and the nest was at the point of the drainage.”
Osborne and Olsen hiked down into the Inferno in August of that year. When they got close enough, they set up a sighting scope and looked into the mouth of the cave.
“It was too dark in there to see very much, but Chad thought something was moving. Then he said something like ‘Oh my God,’ and we saw a very big baby condor come out of the darkness.” Osborne said they sat in the Inferno and watched the chick for two more days, sometimes feeling totally cut off from the rest of world and sometimes hearing the voices of the unseen crowds of tourists gathered on the distant observation points.
Out in California, three condor chicks were seen that year. Two died quickly. The third chick appeared to thrive for months, raising hopes that it would fledge. Then, unexpectedly, it started shedding its tail and secondary feathers. The bird was taken out of the cave and flown to the Los Angeles Zoo, but by the time it arrived it was too late. Veterinarians euthanized the chick on September 14. Necropsy results revealed an irreversible lung disease and a hole in the gastrointestinal tract. Wedged into the condor’s crop were the pop-tops of three aluminum cans, shards of glass and plastic, and an eighteen-inch-long rag soaked in oil. Critics of the program said the necropsy helped prove that California was no longer safe for condors. Noel Snyder renewed his call for a broad review of the program by a panel of ornithologists with no connection to the program.
“This is why we took the wild condors to the zoos in the first place,” Snyder said. “Putting them back into the same environment doesn’t make any sense. If we don’t reduce the lead threat in particular we’ll always have a feeding-station population of condors, and nobody I know wants that.”
Osborne and Olsen hiked back into the Inferno in the fall to check up on the lone remaining wild chick, which was now equipped with giant wings it didn’t know how to use. “For a while it would have these activity bouts where it would flap its wings madly and run around inside the cave. Then it gave us heart attacks by coming out onto the ledge so it was facing the cliff face and beating its wings against the rocks.” The ledge was very narrow and the cave was roughly six hundred feet above the ground.
After that, for a couple of days, the condor barely moved. Osborne and Olsen worried more. On November 5, it had another burst of energy, jumping up and down while seeming to look in fifty directions at once. Then, after seeming to calm down, it jumped off the ledge and fell, spinning and tumbling in a way that reminded Osborne of a maple leaf.
“I don’t know if it had something in mind and overestimated its ability, but it was falling and our hearts were in our throats. The wings were partially extended and the bird was trying to right itself, but the most it could manage was a kind of controlled plummet.” After falling about two hundred feet, the condor briefly disappeared behind a wall of rock that was jutting out of the side of the cliff; then it tumbled back into view, still out of control, with about four hundred feet to go before it would crash into the bottom of the canyon.
Somewhere in that last four hundred feet the condor learned to fly. Not well, but well enough. “It was a surprisingly gentle landing,” Osborne said. “He stood there looking kind of shell-shocked for a minute or two. Then he started walking toward the nest cave.”