The pit traps used to catch the last wild condors looked like shallow graves. When Pete Bloom slid down into one and closed the small trap door, he entered a clammy earthen trench that was six feet long, two and a half feet wide, and approximately four feet deep. It was hard to move around down there without smashing your head on the support beams; not moving meant dealing with cramps that paralyzed your back, neck, and legs. Bloom said he often passed the time lying on his back next to the walkie-talkie, waiting for word that the last of the wild condors had arrived.
He liked it down there. He had to. In 1985, they were his office. “Typically I went into them before sunrise and came out an hour before sunset,” he said. “Then often, I’d go back down into them the next day.”
This is what the fight to save the California condor had come down to in 1987—buried biologists waiting for the chance to leap up out of the ground and grab the last free-flying condor, ending an era that had lasted for at least ten million years.
Nobody in the condor program liked that image, and some absolutely loathed it. But the scientists who knew the condors best knew they’d run out of options. Something in the condor’s habitat was poisoning the birds, and rumors that somebody was trying to kill them were all over the place. The scientists were warning that a reproductive emergency was at hand. Every last condor had to be caught and brought to zoos for captive breeding.
Bloom believed the arguments held moments of weakness. “I felt like the state executioner,” he told me once. “But I knew we were doing the right thing, so that’s what I focused on.”
In 1987, Bloom didn’t look like the kind of guy you’d want to leave your kids with: he was skinny to the point of scrawniness with wild brown hair and a beard, and strange-looking scars made by talons and beaks on his leathery face and hands. He had been raised about a hundred miles south in Orange County, California, where his father maintained helicopters at the local Marine base. When he was a kid, he started trapping red-tailed hawks near his house for the fun of it, and then he started fitting them with tags that helped researchers track their movements. Over the years he’d learned to trap all kinds of other raptors, using everything from cannon nets to wire mesh baited with mice. When Bloom joined the condor recovery team in the 1980s, he was known as one of the most accomplished and reliable trappers.
Packing for the pit traps was a ritual for Bloom. Into his black filthy briefcase always went one walkie-talkie; one set of binoculars; one small battery-operated ceiling fan; one bag of lunch with an extra-large water bottle; one piece of airtight Tupperware with a small roll of toilet paper inside; one lucky hunting knife; one dirty rug; and one 100-percent-cotton sleeping bag. Synthetic bags were out because they were too noisy. Coffee, deodorant, strong-smelling foods, and bug sprays were also forbidden, even though the condors weren’t thought to have a strong sense of smell. “They were avoiding us and we didn’t know why,” said Bloom. “I wasn’t taking any chances.”
The field crews dug at night when the condors were asleep. Usually it took a crew of six to build a trap from start to finish: three or four field biologists, one veterinarian, and one or two designated “master baiters,” so named because it was their job to bolt the carcasses of stillborn calves to the ground in front of the trap. This job usually involved driving out to a local dairy and then wading through knee-deep pools of manure and urine to get the carcass, which was then hosed down, cleaned up, and moved to a freezer close to the trap. “Road-kill deer went in the freezer, too, if they were big enough,” said Bloom. “The only thing we never used were the carcasses of animals shot and left behind by hunters.”
When the trench was finished, it was reinforced with four-by-fours and covered by an inch-thick sheet of plywood. The trapdoor Bloom climbed in and out of was at the front of the structure; in the middle was a head-size hole covered by an upside-down wicker basket that was porous enough to see out of. When Bloom went in, the basket and the plywood were covered with dirt and bits of vegetation—in the end, it looked like a bump in the pasture.
Scavenging birds of every shape and size were quickly drawn to the carcasses—ravens, turkey vultures, black vultures, and golden eagles. When Bloom heard the birds hit the ground, he’d check the wicker viewing basket for black widow spiders, often squashing one or two beneath one of his boots. Then he’d push his head up through the hole in the plywood and peek at the mayhem taking place five feet in front of him. Sometimes Bloom saw a half dozen golden eagles fight for choice chunks of meat while another half dozen stood back waiting for an opening. Once he saw an eagle dive at least three hundred feet into the back of another large bird, knocking it senseless and clear of the spot the eagle wanted on the carcass.
“Ravens sometimes parted the grass in front of the basket with their beaks,” said Bloom. “They would see my eyes looking at them, and back away like nothing had happened. I’m certain they knew I was there, they just couldn’t believe it.”
He could have reached out and grabbed any number of golden eagles by the legs: he’d done it dozens of times while working other jobs. But condors were another matter.
“Very cautious birds,” he said. “Sometimes they’d fly over the carcass once and never come back, and other times they’d circle down and land on a dead branch near the top of a tree. They’d watch the other birds eat for hours and then turn around and leave. That’s what usually happened.”
Bloom said it was easy to recognize the sound of an approaching condor: the whoosh that became a roar kept getting louder and louder until it ended with the thump of great big feet and the clatter of enormous wings. When the condors walked directly over the trap, Bloom could hear them breathing, their wheezing lungs sounding something like a winded child’s. Looking through the basket at the carcass, he would see the smaller birds start flapping and scattering about, jumping out of the condor’s path like peasants diving off the road at the approach of the king’s carriage.
Condors were usually trapped by nets fired out of small cannons, but Bloom tried not to use them when he didn’t have to. There was always the chance that one of the cannons would fall over and start a fire, or shoot too low and blow a hole in the bird. The guns might fail to fire all at once; plus, they required explosives. Finally, it was very hard to hide a cannon.
But the pits, if built properly, were undetectable, he said. From the air they blended in perfectly with the soil and the vegetation, and when the birds were on the ground, they did not notice the difference in terrain. “Eagles and condors on the ground look up and around for danger all the time,” he said. “But they hardly ever look down for predators, and we used that to our advantage.”
The trapping had gone slowly and fitfully, but by the end of 1986, there were only two condors left in the wild. Bloom caught one of them, a bird known officially as AC-5, on February 27. He remembered looking up and seeing the silhouette of the last remaining wild California condor set against the clear blue sky. That bird was Igor.
David Brower ached to see the condors, but he did not want to track them down. They were creatures with a driving need to stay away from people, he had always said. People who handled them were biological thugs, in his opinion, “macho scientists” who sat around comparing their scars. To Brower, this was conservation science at its worst, if it was conservation at all.
“A condor is [only] five percent feathers, flesh, blood and bone,” he once wrote in an open letter. “The rest is place. Condors are a soaring manifestation of the place that built them and coded their genes. That place requires space to meet in, to teach fledglings to roost unmolested, to bathe and drink in, to find other condors in (and not biologists), and to fly over wild and free.”1
In 1987, this was the rhetoric that powered what was left of the “hands-off” school of condor conservation, which at one time had been endorsed by the state’s most powerful and accomplished natural scientists.
But the number of condors left in the wild had fallen since the end of World War II, and drastic scientific interventions in their lives had become routine. Plans to trap the condors and breed them in captivity had now been endorsed by all the relevant government agencies and a panel of nationally known ornithologists and natural scientists.
But Brower would not be persuaded to endorse their method, and that gave people pause. He was one of the most important environmentalists in American history, famous for his hatred of compromise solutions, and this, in his view, was way past compromise. This was virtual extinction.
I called him in late 1986, while the trapping was under way: he spent the next fifteen minutes firing broadsides at the federal recovery program, using words and phrases I had heard him use before. The California Condor Recovery Program was a perfect example of how not to save a disappearing species: it was a high-risk experiment on a creature that deserved much better.
“To save it, the condor was destroyed,” said Brower on the phone. “The zoos have everything they wanted.”
Brower’s confrontational style was one of the reasons he no longer worked for the Sierra Club, and it would soon be one of the reasons for his split with Friends of the Earth. But Brower’s seething eloquence was his genius, too: early on it helped him define the modern American environmental movement.
Brower wrote the book on environmental land wars in the early 1950s, just after he became director of the Sierra Club. The Federal Bureau of Reclamation, long known in the West as an agency that could not be defeated, had just announced that it would raise a series of new dams in an astonishingly beautiful corner of the Colorado River Basin. Western cities and so-called recreationists loved the idea, but Brower hated it. Even before it was revealed that one of the dams would flood part of Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument, he was preparing to fight it.
When the plan to flood a small part of the park was made public, Brower launched the land war that earned his place in history. To stop the dams, he organized ranchers and lawyers and hikers, who rarely spoke to each other, and hired Wallace Stegner, Utah’s answer to Shakespeare, to edit a picture book/anthology called This Is Dinosaur. He then commissioned a documentary that demonized the bureau by arguing that the dams could not be built safely.
Then he drew the whole country into the fight by buying a full-page ad in the New York Times. The ad declared that there was really only “one, simple, incredible issue here—this time it’s the Grand Canyon they want to flood. The GRAND CANYON.” When the bureau tried to rally support from fishermen and water-skiers, Brower placed another full-page ad in the Washington Post: “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?”
The Sierra Club lost its tax-exempt status after these ads ran. But the bureau lost the war. Three of the proposed dams were not built, and it’s all but certain that they never will be. According to the writer John McPhee in his Encounters with the Archdruid, these tactics set the gold standard for future environmental battles.
He went after the basic mathematics underlying the Bureau’s proposals and uncovered embarrassing errors. All this was accompanied by flanking movements of intense publicity—paid advertisements, a film, a book—envisioning a National Monument of great scenic, scientific and cultural value being covered with water. The Bureau protested that the conservationists were exaggerating—honing and bending the truth—but the Bureau protested without effect. Conservationists say the Dinosaur Victory was the birth of the modern conservation movement—the turning point at which conservation became something more than contour plowing.2
Those were the strategies Brower carried into the condor wars, which he viewed as a fight to save not only the condor but a creature whose plight was symbolic of the threat to endangered species all over the world. “We can respect the dignity of a creature that has done our species no wrong,” he once wrote. “Except perhaps to prefer us at a distance.”
Brower often told reporters that his interest in condors dated to the early 1930s, when he was a daring and extremely accomplished rock climber. Then, in the 1940s, he met a man named Carl Koford at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California-Berkeley. Koford was finishing the study that defined the condor as a creature of the wild. Brower came away convinced that saving them meant saving wild places.
When Koford died of cancer in 1979, Brower became the alpha male of the hands-off movement. With the help of Dave Phillips, a colleague and close friend, Brower questioned every move the federal condor team made. Friends of the Earth, the group he then ran, put out a book called The Condor Question: Captive or Forever Free? and a documentary that showed a condor dying in the arms of a biologist.
However, when I called Brower in 1986, the battle had been lost. Lawsuits had failed to stop the trapping plans; calls to influential friends and federal officials had been ignored. The governing board of the Sierra Club had voted to support the “hands-on” approach, as had a panel of nationally prominent natural scientists. Phillips said he and Brower faced those facts near the end of 1986, while sitting in the darkened San Francisco office of Friends of the Earth. “We’d done everything we could do to stop the zoos and their friends, but it hadn’t been enough. We knew the wild bird was gone,” Phillips recalled. “If we got a bird back from the zoos, we’d get a tamed-down version of the condor—a bird that had been trained to fly back and forth inside a grid.”
By then, David Brower had gone looking for the birds, overcoming previous misgivings. In 1984, at the age of seventy-two, he joined a group of bird-watchers near the summit of Mount Pinos, in Ventura County, where condors sometimes showed themselves. His hair had long ago turned white and he couldn’t climb anymore, so he waited with the crowd near a parking lot, holding his binoculars.
“Then came my lucky day,” he wrote years later. “A pair of birds moved toward us, probably well attuned to the human throng on the Mount Pinos summit and adding to their own life list of people they observed.”3
Brower saw the large white triangular patches underneath the wings, and the big red fleshy heads on the periscopic necks.
“What those birds did for the wild sky lifted my heart and gave the vault above me a new dimension I had never paid attention to before,” he wrote. “I could wonder what it would be like to think the way a condor does, to sweep so much of creation at one glance, to know the wind.”
He was beside himself. “When you have waited seventy years to witness such a performance,” he wrote, “when you have been willing to forgo it if the witnessing might somehow affect the condor’s survival, and when the display is finally there before you, you can be excused for feeling excited, euphoric, and especially privileged.”
When Brower and I spoke briefly on the phone after that, I asked him whether he’d go looking for a zoo-bred condor that had been restored to the wild. Brower said he didn’t think he would live to see it happen.
Turns out he was wrong, but not by much.
The man in charge of the condor-breeding center at the Los Angeles Zoo had been sleeping on a roof near the breeding compounds with a rifle at his side. Mike Wallace might have heard an owl or two above the endless drone of the traffic, but on most nights that was it, unless you counted the environmental activists climbing up the trees of Griffith Park, which surrounds the zoo.
“Earth First!, Animal Liberation Front, people like that,” he said. Wallace says the activists also tried to howl like wolves from time to time.
As the last few wild condors were brought to the zoos in the late 1980s, hard-line environmentalists kept hinting at plans to “liberate” the captive birds. Native Americans claimed their culture would officially die when the last wild condor was captured. At the Los Angeles Zoo, a man in a condor costume roller-skated back and forth all day in front of tourists, handing out leaflets that made it look like the zoo was an Alcatraz for condors.
Wallace thought a lot of these people were fools, but he tried to keep that thought to himself. Sometimes, he’d go out to try to reason with the activists, but those conversations went nowhere.
“Very weird times,” he said years later. “The PR staff was freaked out by the bad publicity, and by the thought that something terrible would happen when AC-9 was captured. They were like, ‘Oh my God, what if it dies in here?’ I told them to relax. Good things were going to happen.”
Wallace told the staff to expect an uproar when Igor was captured, but assured them in a few days it would all die down and the activists would go away. The birds would breed and the chicks would grow into healthy wild condors. Then, barring a meteor strike, some of the condors born at the zoo would be released into the wild, and finally the Los Angeles Zoo would begin to escape its reputation as a minor-league institution. People would describe it as the place that saved the California condor, and not as a cheap imitation of the larger and richer zoo in San Diego. Wallace believed with all his heart that this was almost certainly the way the future would play out, and when he said as much to the PR staff, it helped to calm them down.
But Wallace also knew there were outcomes to be feared. One of the fears was that the chicks produced by these birds would be deformed by a genetic disease. Or maybe the condors would refuse to breed in captivity; maybe their chicks would be tame. Returning condors to the wild would then be impossible. They were going to need a lot of luck at the zoos. Wallace kept that thought to himself.
“Nobody had ever done these things before,” he said. “We’d been forced to make a lot of key decisions without much information. You can work your ass off to prepare for these things, but you’re never really ready.”
Wallace said he used the rifle he slept with on the roof of the zoo to shoot at the vermin. “Rats and foxes used to try to get to the breeding pens. I shot a few of them, no big deal. I grew up on a farm in Maine. I would never have thought of using it on the activists,” he said. “But the activists didn’t know that, and that was fine with me.”
The mood was very different at the breeding center run by the San Diego Wild Animal Park, partly because it was set in the foothills of some dried-out mountains in a yet-to-be-developed part of San Diego County. Activists never climbed in the trees making unconvincing wolf sounds there. No one in a condor suit roller-skated in the parking lot.
But the park had gotten a host of threatening phone calls, and it was prepared for trouble: tall wire fences topped with concertina wire surrounded the facilities, and the guard who opened the gates checked strangers’ IDs closely.
Inside the compound the rows of tall wire flight pens were covered on all sides with plywood. Fourteen California condors were living in those pens at the start of 1987, leading what captive-breeding expert Bill Toone said were quiet, uneventful lives. Like Mike Wallace, Toone had been studying condors for most of his career, preparing for the day when the future of the species would be in the hands of the zoos. He was absolutely certain the wild birds would breed.
“No doubt whatsoever,” he said. “We’d spent years working Andean condors, and they were breeding prolifically. California condors were different birds, but not that different.”
But Toone was also a nervous wreck in 1987. Tensions on the field teams were alarmingly high, and he was sick of being portrayed as a “condor cager,” ignorant of the need to save habitats as well as birds.
Toone said he had always shared David Brower’s urge to save more of the condor’s rangelands, even though he didn’t think there was a shortage of protected condor habitat. What he didn’t share—what he detested—was the idea that the zoos had been plotting to capture all the condors for decades now. He blamed Brower and his allies for the condor decline, noting that they had snuffed a plan to breed a very small number of California condors in captivity in the early 1950s. Those would have hatched a lot of eggs, Toone argued—many more than they would have been able to produce in the wild. Those captive chicks would have grown up into condors that could have been released into the wild, said Toone. By the late 1980s, they’d have been thriving out there.
The magnitude of what it meant to take a condor out of the wild hit Toone one day in the mid-1980s when he climbed into a condor sanctuary to get to an egg a condor had just laid on the floor of a craggy-looking cave. Toone and biologist Noel Snyder were planning to take the egg to a zoo where it would be hatched and raised. When the two men reached the cave, they noticed the mother of the egg was inside watching over it. Toone and Snyder hid and waited until the mother condor flew away. But, as soon as they entered the cave, Toone heard a vaguely musical roar approaching the cave entrance. He turned to see the mother condor swooping back and forth past the opening, hoping to make the egg thieves go away.
A wave of doubt washed over Toone at that moment. “It occurred to me that there was a living embryo in this egg—if it hatched in captivity, it would spend most of its life in a pen that was no more than forty feet wide, eighty feet long, and twenty-two feet tall, and this was a bird that soared at altitudes measured by the mile. In that instant I promised myself I’d stay with the program until a bird raised in captivity was released to the wild. Then I would walk away.”
Near the end Pete Bloom had a recurring nightmare: Igor lands on the carcass and Bloom catches him easily, but then he trips and falls on top of the bird, killing it instantly. Next thing he knows he is standing in front of a microphone at a press conference, looking out at glaring lights and hundreds of reporters. The press conference is endless, but there’s only one question: How did it feel to kill the last free-flying condor?
Bloom had been waiting in the clammy darkness of the pit trap for several months now, but Igor had not taken the bait. The last free-flying condor saw the carcass, and he often circled down a bit to take a closer look. But he must not have liked what he was seeing down there—after a few minutes, most of the time, he would turn and fly away.
No one in the condor program was surprised to hear that Igor was the last bird left. He’d been closely watched and tracked since the day he hatched in the wild, and he’d always been remarkably independent, if a little klutzy. “When he was young, he was a very friendly, curious bird,” said Bloom. “It was easy to approach him.” Bloom says Igor’s friendly disposition held when the condor started looking for a mate. It kept holding when Igor’s first attempts to breed went nowhere, partly because his mating dance seemed to go on forever, and partly because he kept attempting to mount his partners from the front.
Then in the eighties, the trapping started and Igor was never the same. Bloom says Igor was captured twice by people hidden in pit traps; once for blood tests, and once to have radio transmitters bolted to his wings. After those events, when approaching a carcass, Igor was exceptionally cautious, sometimes watching other vultures eat for days from the top of nearby roost trees.
Bloom said he’d looked up and seen this condor looking down as the other condors were captured. No one knows what the condor learned by watching other birds, but Bloom had a hunch his bird had learned to see the pit traps from the air. Maybe the mound of earth that covered Bloom’s viewing basket was the clue that gave the traps away. Maybe it was the way the cannon nets were always buried.
Bloom also gave some thought to another explanation: maybe someone on the trapping team was tipping Igor off. “All you’d have to do was take a tiny mirror out and flash the sun into the condor’s eyes. You might also make a sudden movement when nobody on the ground was looking. I was pretty paranoid for a while there.”
Bloom and his crew built a new kind of trap in April 1987; the pit and the viewing basket weren’t placed so close to the carcass, and a row of small cannons rigged to fire a big net over the carcass was added and disguised as bushes. A long, buried black cord connected to the first cannon ran over to the pit trap and into the bottom of a plastic tube with a red button on top. Bloom held the trigger as he waited.
Igor did a lot of wandering in April 1987, sometimes flying north along the crooked spine of California’s coastal mountains, or winding west through the Transverse Ranges. ID tags with great big 9s on them hung from the front of his wings, and a radio transmitter was bolted onto the left wing. Teams of Igor trackers in pickup trucks had been chasing the beeps sent from the transmitter, but for weeks the last free-flying condor had toyed with them. Sometimes he hovered over the pickups, looking down at them. Then he’d turn and disappear over the top of a roadless mountain for several days, panicking his would-be captors.
Bloom’s hopes rose on April 18, when Igor landed on a dead branch at the top of a tree near a trap. The bird stared down at the carcass for a while, but then he flew away. Bloom sent the crew home so some of them could spend the next day celebrating Easter. When Bloom was home he got a call from a radio tracker named Jan Hamber, who told him that Igor had returned to the tree and fallen asleep. Bloom immediately called the trapping crew back into the field.
Igor woke up late the next morning, as condors are wont to do. He lounged around and spread his wings to catch the sun, never leaving his perch. Several hours later, as if on a whim, he stepped off his branch and floated down toward the carcass. He landed just beyond the range of a big mesh trap net attached to four small cannons. He paused to look around for what Bloom remembers as an eternity.
And then the condor clomped past the basket and planted one of his fat pink feet on top of the carcass. After one more look around, Igor whipped his beak down, burying his head inside the carcass. For an instant, he was blind and deaf. Bloom pushed the button that fired the net.
Four bushes seemed to explode. A thin black line sailed out of the ground between the bushes, spreading out into a net as it arced over Igor’s head. As the bird began to run, there was another crash, and a bearded man flew up out of the ground.
Igor, running and flapping his wings, was one step from the edge of the net when Pete Bloom caught him. With his right arm, he closed the wings; his left hand closed the beak. When someone slipped a hood over Igor’s head, the last wild condor stopped fighting.
Not long afterward, Igor was locked inside a medium-size dog kennel and driven to the Oxnard airport, in Ventura County. There he was loaded into a plane that did not go to Los Angeles, where activists were ready to rattle the fences at the Los Angeles Zoo, but to an airport in a rural part of San Diego County, the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Wallace and Toone had secretly agreed to make the switch to avoid the scene up in Los Angeles. By the time the demonstrators figured it out, it was way too late, said Wallace. No demonstrations were reported.
The stories that ran in the papers the next morning read like eulogies, which seemed appropriate. No matter what happened to the birds in the future, April 19, 1987, would now be marked as a low point in American environmental history. And here’s what I have always considered the saddest thing about it: of the tens of millions of people now living in the condor’s former rangeland, few know what condors are. Fewer still know what the condor used to be, or why that’s so incredibly important.