The wild wastes of a century ago are now dotted with lumber mills, mine shafts and smelters. Under the earth extends a network of pipelines for oil and natural gas and above it, a network of high extension wires for electric current. The canneries and packing houses, oil refineries, aircraft factories and movie studios ship their products to every corner of the Nation and beyond. The Californian of today feels a personal pride in the state’s gargantuan public works; high-ways, bridges, dams and aqueducts. And most of all, of course, he exults the region’s “happy future.”
—From California: A Guide to the
Golden State
The best thing that can happen to a condor nest is that nobody finds it.
—Carl Koford1
Somewhere in the Bering Sea, 1943: The military catapult roars across the deck of the USS Richmond like a giant sprung trap, whipping the top-wing scout plane toward the windward side of the cruiser. The part of the catapult that holds the plane accelerates to sixty miles an hour in the space of fifty feet and then hits a padded brace and stops dead. But the single-engine Kingfisher equipped with three machine guns and one depth charge keeps on going, sailing off the deck and out over the water.
The jolting launch makes the pilot and crew of the plane feel like human cannonballs, but they’re used to it. They know that when the plane leaves the catapult behind, it will start to lose momentum, but only until the propellers seize the wind. At that point the scout plane will come to life and arc up into the sky. As the plane rises, Carl Koford will take out his maps and his binoculars and begin looking for Japanese warships. As he did this surveillance work, he must have thought about the bird he once described as the “acme of soaring flight.” After all, this was the man who would later produce one of the most influential and controversial endangered species reports ever written: The California Condor, researched before and after World War II and published in 1952.2
The outstanding characteristic of the flight of condors is high stability in soaring. Frequently even an experienced observer mistakes a distant transport plane for a condor or a condor for a plane.
Carl Koford is the patron saint of condor field research. During World War II, he was the barrel-chested kid in the rear cockpit of the navy scout plane, in between the pilot and the tail gunner. It was his job to scan the water for the periscopes of submarines while looking for potential bombing sites along the Alaskan coast. When he saw a vessel on the Bering Sea, he pointed it out to the pilot; their plane would circle down to buzz the craft until it raised the proper flag. Koford also watched the skies above the horizons for thin black dashes that could only be approaching planes: if the dashes you missed were Japanese Zeros, you could be blown out of the sky. Top-wing scout planes were easy targets compared to Koford’s birds.3
The pursued bird dives downward in a steep flex-glide, twisting from side to side, and the pursuer follows. Both swoop up out of the dive, flapping at about the same time, flapping at the end of the swoop to gain every possible inch of altitude.
No one knows what went through Koford’s mind when he was flying those surveillance missions. He was not allowed to even mention his work in letters to family and friends, and when the war was over he didn’t seem to see the point in sitting around telling old war stories. But when the world’s leading expert on California condors looked down out of his plane for signs of trouble, it’s a good bet he thought about the vulture. Koford had been living in the company of condors when Pearl Harbor was bombed. When the war was over, he picked up where he’d left off, taking incredibly detailed notes on the lives of condors in the wild.
In pursuing the field research I observed living condors between March 1939, and June 1941, on approximately 400 days. After a period of service with the United States Navy I watched condors on 80 days between February and July 1946 and on 15 days subsequently. The record of my personal observations consists of 3500 pages of field notes.
Carl Koford’s study gave biologists a voice in fights affecting the future of the species, partly by providing them with a legally defensible set of scientific observations. After Koford, it wasn’t enough for ranchers to insist that condors sometimes flew off with living cattle, or for hunters to insist that the birds would soon be gone regardless of what they did, or for the developers and agribusiness-men who wanted the condor’s land to simply take it. After Koford, they needed proof. When they failed to offer it, the condor’s defenders had a way to make them retreat—they had the “definitive” study of the bird, and they weren’t afraid to use it.
Koford’s book changed the political course of the condor wars by insisting that the bird was savable. Even more important, the study redefined the condor as a creature whose survival was tied to the fate of the wild. Koford’s condor was a bird that needed isolation like fish need water. These birds could not be protected by rules that limited logging and hunting and fishing at the heart of their range; they needed refuges that were closed forever to humans, period. Koford wasn’t the first to put this argument forward, but he was the first to try to back it up with facts he found in the field.
The need for these facts rose sharply at the end of the 1930s, when the U.S. Forest Service tried to build a road through a stretch of central California wilderness where condors bathed near waterfalls and nested in caves. When the road-building project was delayed by a proposal to turn the area into a sanctuary, the people who wanted the road called the bird an enemy of progress and a threat to the American way. “What Price Condor?” began an article that ran in Field and Stream in 1939. “The bird with the greatest wing-span has outlived its time.”
The author of this article was H. H. Sheldon, an exasperated businessman and naturalist who thought the road should be built. Sheldon didn’t think the condor deserved the attention and support it was then attracting, given the ominous state of world affairs. Europe was a “powder keg” with war “sparking along the fuse”; Asia and Spain were places where bombs were “blasting children to bits.” A second world war was lurking out there somewhere, Sheldon feared, and of course he was right about that.
But when Sheldon read the papers in towns such as Santa Barbara, he didn’t find articles warning of war. Instead he found headlines warning of a threat to a big black vulture that was doomed in any case. “In size and structure the condor is a magnificent bird,” Sheldon wrote. “But its habits are deplorable and its purpose is finished.” Sheldon later qualified the line about the condor’s magnificent size, reminding the readers of Field and Stream that “size alone is no guarantee of virtue. If the elephant had the habits of a hyena, no one would mourn its passing.”
Sheldon threw every insult at the condor he could think of, describing it as ugly, putrid, clumsy, obsolete—a downright “evil-appearing bird, dressed in a scrofulous black with bloody head”:
His habits would make a guillotine look like an angel of mercy. He is not a killer; he is a glutton of death. He displays all the characteristics of a pig, and some that the most disreputable pig would disown. Gourmand and ghoul, gorging himself on dead or dying animals is his sole object in life. When he has stuffed himself to the limits of his capacity, not even his great 10-foot spread of wings can lift him from the ground without tremendous effort.
Sheldon did not understand how a bird like this could take precedence “over the siege of Madrid and [the saga of ] Americans stranded in Shanghai.” And “[f ]ew in the East have heard of it. Few in the west have seen it…And so little is known about it, even in the west, where it has lived through ages, that conservationists actually believe it can be saved from extinction by setting up sanctuaries for its use.”
Sheldon didn’t think sanctuaries would do the bird any good, all but daring those who disagreed to prove their point. How sad it seemed to Sheldon that after failing to lift a finger to conserve the California grizzly, the state’s “conservationists” would end up fighting for this. “I am a naturalist and a conservationist,” Sheldon wrote, “and [I] believe the passing of any species to extinction would affect me with more regret than would assail the average individual. But to set aside a sanctuary in the belief that the condor will continue to exist is to act without knowledge of the facts.” What Sheldon left out was that there were no facts about the wild condors’ needs, because no one had ever sat and watched them live their lives.
Koford was living in the mountains that were the condors’ home then—a place called the Sespe, because it had once been part of the vast Sespe Ranch. The research grant that put him there, funded by two rich condor enthusiasts, required him to work alone and at a distance from the condors, save for the occasional photo. His goal, as he put it, was to “discover, investigate and record all obtainable…data dealing with the natural history and especially the environmental relations of the California condor.”
This project was the brainchild of Joseph Grinnell. This was the same Joe Grinnell who’d fought attempts to limit “shotgun ornithology,” but by the 1930s, it was clear that these birds needed a different kind of attention. Grinnell didn’t think there were more than twenty-five pairs of California condors left in the world in the late 1930s, and it was his hunch that those numbers were falling. Farmers and ranchers had been killing off ground squirrels and other rodents by spreading a slow-acting poison called thallium across a good part of the condor’s range. Grinnell thought the practice was insidious but hadn’t been able to stop it.
He asked the National Audubon Society to help him cover the costs of the project, and the society jumped at the chance. Audubon was then the most powerful environmental group in the United States, but in the early 1930s, it had been consumed by in-house policy fights and bitter power struggles. John Baker, a Wall Street investment broker who was Audubon’s director, was trying to harness the organization’s wasted energy when Grinnell got in touch with him. Baker said he would gladly add a condor job to a short list of projects to be covered by a brand-new Audubon Research Fellowship program. The ivory-billed woodpecker and the California condor would be the first two species studied.
Grinnell had one request. Audubon was “not to issue any publicity in relation to the California condor without submitting the same in advance for approval or rejection to those in charge of the research project at the University of California, and vice-versa.” This was supposed to make it harder for unscrupulous collectors to find the nest caves. But the real goal was to drop a cloak of invisibility over the entire refuge. Grinnell apparently thought the condor could be saved on a need-to-know basis. Carl Koford’s job was to find out whether he was right.
Koford hitched his first ride into condor country in the spring of 1939, wearing the hobnailed logging boots he always took to the field. In his backpack was a letter of introduction from Grinnell, who was known to everyone in California who cared about wildlife. The letter said Koford was a man with a sensitive and unusual ecological mission, for “it is the knowledge of the living condors that he specially seeks”:
In carrying out his field work Mr. Koford has been earnestly enjoined not to disturb the birds in any vital way; his aim is to practice technical “watching” with glasses, from a distance, whereby he will gradually learn the ways of life of this dramatically interesting bird species.
I hereby bespeak for Mr. Koford the help of Forest officers throughout the country that he needs, in his work, to penetrate; also, the sympathetic and possibly outright aid of whomever else he may meet…. He desires no publicity whatsoever; none of us concerned wishes anything said or done, as through newspaper channels, which would in any degree increase the hazards of existence for these birds.4
The famous naturalist never said why he picked Koford to do this particular job; Grinnell died of a heart attack in 1939. “I trust that you will have notified one or two of your colleagues to watch out for him,” said Grinnell in one of his last letters, to a friend in the U.S. Forest Service. “He is a quiet, earnest chap and will ‘wear well,’ I predict.” Grinnell thought Koford might enjoy working in an isolated setting.
As it turned out, “enjoy” was not the word. Koford took to condor country like a feral cat with a notebook in its paw, stalking the birds for weeks on end, writing down everything. He always used a German technical pen with an extremely fine point. He always used one particular kind of notebook. He always copied his field notes into a second notebook before going to sleep, in script that’s hard to read without a magnifying glass.
Field notation is a hoary art that greatly predates Charles Darwin, who started dividing living groups by species in the eighteenth century. But Koford wasn’t looking for phylogenetic distinctions in the Sespe, or in finding a bug he could name after himself. What he did instead was to fill thousands of pages with descriptions of condor behavior. Hardly anybody studied so-called nonessential species in the 1930s, and when they did, they usually studied carcasses. But there was Koford, trying hard to write it all down. Wide-angle note taking of this sort was known as “the Grinnellian method,” in which “the behavior of the animal is described and everything else which is thought by the collector to be of use in the study of the species is put on record at the time the observations are made in the field.” If the day is overcast, you write that down. If the bird starts blinking, you start counting.
4:30 P.M.—This condor, like others I have watched, blinks constantly; most blinks are from a half to three seconds apart; 5 seconds seems about maximum. I wonder whether a red iris has any red filter effect on a bird’s vision. The brightest orange on a condor is between the bill and the feathers between the eyes.
Koford was the first to note that parent condors rarely fly directly to the nest caves, choosing instead to land nearby and look around for predators. Instead of merely noting that a bird has landed, he writes about “a condor circling with legs dangling about 150 feet above the cliff,” and then touching down after making five quick backward movements with its wings. After this bird landed and opened its bill, Koford noted an “orange tongue lying on the lower mandible”; a few seconds later “its head gave one sharp shake as if to dislodge a fly.”
“I have never seen his equal,” says Steve Herman, a staunch defender and former student of Koford’s. “Biologists around today say a lot of it is hype, but let me tell you something. In the field, they wouldn’t have raised a pimple on Koford’s ass.”
November 2001: I’m sitting at the point of a rock escarpment in the middle of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in the Ventura County backcountry, taking in the prehistoric view. The map in my pocket says I’m looking at one of the lines of mountains in the Transverse Ranges. But I’m having trouble seeing the “line” part. What I see instead is a jumbled mess of hugely varied landscapes, bent and broken in a way that makes it look like something punched its way up through the crust of the earth.
Off in the distance, near the horizon, is the brown haze that marks the outskirts of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Closer in, on a grass plateau cracked open by earthquakes, I see tilted pasturelands once grazed by Spanish cattle. Rolling hillsides end in cliffs that make it look like a colossal beast beneath the earth is trying to punch its way out. “Geologic upthrust” is the scientific term used to describe the scene in front of me. I half expect to see a giant stone fist come crashing up through one of the mountains.
I can see a knifelike fissure running roughly north and south. I’m told it’s an offshoot of the “big bend” that turns the San Andreas fault line to the east beneath the Transverse. When David Brower joked that condors could only be saved by an earthquake big enough to put Los Angeles under the Pacific Ocean, it was this network of fault lines that he was counting on to do it.
But the fissure isn’t what dominates the view from the spot known by biologists as “Koford’s Observation Point,” or “Koford’s O.P.” The dominant thing is a pockmarked curtain of yellowish cliffs that ends in a wide plateau on my side of the fissure. The cliffs fall abruptly for several hundred feet into a valley full of chaparral. Koford’s escarpment rises on the other side of that valley.
I’m thinking three thoughts while I’m taking in the view. One is that it’s easy to see why Koford came up here all the time. The pockmarks in those yellow cliffs are nest caves used by condors in his day. From here, with a sitting scope, he could sit and watch them all day long.
I’m also thinking about the grizzly bear head that used to hang on the wall of Lechler’s grocery store in Piru, at the southern base of these mountains. I remember sitting in Lechler’s store in the early 1960s and staring at that head, imagining that its giant body was sticking out of the other side of the wall. When Mr. Lechler told me that was not the case, I decided the body was still walking around in the mountains to the north, feeling around for its head. That thought returned to me this morning when I hiked across some big black bear tracks.
I’m also thinking that you’d have to be nuts to try to move around out there. The chaparral below looks like concertina wire, and the cliffs resemble a scene from Mordor in Lord of the Rings. Moving back and forth would have been hell, which may be why Koford thrived there. Herman says Koford appeared to enjoy leaving students in his dust. And like all of Grinnell’s disciples, he was skilled at living off the land. He drank the water he found in potholes and he often shot his meals; the speed with which he skinned small birds was on a par with the naturalists of old.
“Once when we were in the mountains of Mexico looking for the last of the Mexican grizzly bears,” Herman wrote in an e-mail,
he saw me struggling with a small sparrow I had shot, trying to relieve it of its skin and stuff it in a way that would preserve it….
Carl watched me…for a few minutes and then took the bird. He fit his drugstore reading glasses on his nose and settled into a canvas chair and began wielding his scalpel with considerable skill. Zip, zip, zip and the skin was off. A few more minutes and the bird was stuffed and wrapped, as if it were lying in state. Something that would have taken me nearly an hour had taken Koford minutes.
Old-school ornithologists like to joke that you can’t really understand a study species until you’ve eaten it, but condor steaks were not on Koford’s menu, and the smaller birds were eaten rarely. Koford’s old friends say he often skipped meals when he was out in the field. At times his diet seemed to consist entirely of canned apricots. One of the biologists who followed Koford into the Sespe Condor Sanctuary says he could tell where Koford had been by looking for the empty cans.
Koford had a cabin a couple of miles to the south of his escarpment. It looked out on a pond the condors used to bathe in all the time. But the bulk of his work was done on the other side of the broad dry canyon interrupted by the curtain of pockmarked cliffs. After hacking partway through that nasty chaparral for a couple days, he’d build a blind and watch the condor caves for weeks at a time, focusing on a breeding pair with a fledgling he called Oscar. Koford saw Oscar’s parents chase off ravens and golden eagles. Once he watched the chick try fruitlessly to scratch its itchy head. “Five times the left foot was brought to the head to scratch,” he wrote in his field notes. “Each time only one or two quick strokes were managed before the foot had to be hastily replaced…” Koford also watched a parent bird feed the chick by holding its open bill about an inch above the chick’s head. “The chick then jams its head up into the adult’s throat from below and the adult’s head [starts shaking], either from regurgitation or from the wrestling actions of the chick. After a few seconds the chick pulled its head down out of the parent’s throat, holding a light-colored chunk of partially digested animal remains. The chick wolfed it down and beat its wings to beg the parent bird for more. It went on this way for quite some time.”
Koford didn’t think much of the gizmos sometimes used to make the lives of the note-takers easier. Other field biologists tape-recorded their observations and transcribed them later. Koford thought the practice lazy. His 32-power sighting scope and the wreck he called his car may have been his only prized technological possessions.
“Carl was frugal,” said Herman, putting it delicately. “For instance, his car had a tendency to stall…. It turned out that he had adjusted the carburetor so that the gas/air mixture was very, very lean, i.e., as little gas as possible relative to the air. It was so lean that the motor only ran when the car was moving.”5
Herman, who is in his seventies, thinks the differences between what Koford did and what field biologists do now are extremely difficult to fathom. Koford never tried to trap the birds and bolt ID tags to their wings or test their blood for man-made poisons. He never tried to follow them with tracking devices or even to find out where all the nests were. For the most part Koford sat and watched and wrote it all down, even if it didn’t seem important.
“He was a generalist,” said Herman. “He’s the one who built the baseline. The fact of the matter is that condors really were wild birds in Koford’s day, and even my day. They are no longer, and in fact they are about as far from being truly wild as anything could get and still fly around.”
Herman wrote those words years later when the hands-off school of condor management launched by Koford’s work was under attack by so-called hands-on scientists with the zoos and the federal government. He thinks abandoning the Koford approach was a terrible mistake.
Koford wasn’t always the only human near the condor caves. Before the war, he chased off strangers armed with cameras and guns, but sometimes the strangers made it past him. Once, a magazine photographer brought a model into one of the nest caves, shooting pictures while she posed with one of the birds. Others would flush out the birds by throwing rocks at them or firing shots into the air.
Some who came to visit Koford and the birds were anything but stangers. Loye Miller made the trip in 1939 with his son Alden, who’d just taken over the job of running the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at U.C.-Berkeley. After peering into Oscar’s cave through Koford’s sighting scope, they watched a pair of condors stage what Loye Miller called a “clumsy dogfight” aloft. He also wrote of watching a group of eleven birds fly near the ridge the men were standing on, passing back and forth at eye level and striking “a variety of poses in the air.” Miller was amazed by the way the birds moved around in air that was almost completely still, twisting their tails and calibrating the giant black feathers at the ends of their wings. Later they saw the condors linger over a scoured carcass, appearing to “loaf on the wing for a time for the mere pleasure of the exercise.”
Koford spent a lot of time with J. R. Pemberton and Ed Harrison, oilmen and former egg collectors who helped fund his research grant and told him how to get to Oscar’s cave. Pemberton was a physically imposing man who’d made a fortune building a railroad in Patagonia; now he was the California state official who evaluated oil-drilling proposals. Harrison was the heir to an oil fortune who didn’t need to work for a living; when condor-egg hunting was outlawed in the early 1900s, he’d begun pursuing other egg collections. The two men shared an interest in the condor and the cracked terrain that was its home. There was lots of oil hidden under this terrain, and they were looking for potential drilling sites. When movie cameras first became portable, Harrison and Pemberton took one up the mountains to the high plateaus that form parts of the Sespe, where they started filming condors in their caves.
These two men were Koford’s best friends in the field at the time, always bringing him groceries and the latest camera gear. On more than one occasion, the three of them filmed condors flying in and out of their nests, even though that wasn’t always what the condors wanted to be doing. Pemberton sometimes encouraged the birds out by firing his pistol. Harrison and Koford filmed each other sitting inside nest caves with a condor in their arms. I saw the films in Harrison’s office in Los Angeles.6
Koford quit his fellowship to go to war when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. During the war, he may have used an old birder’s trick to tell Harrison where he was. On postcards that were otherwise free of any hints of his location, Koford is said to have mentioned a species of bird that could only be found near the Bering Sea, where the USS Richmond was stationed.
World War II changed California almost as much as it changed Japan. Hundreds of thousands of military families moved out to the Los Angeles area; rows of homes and freeways were unrolled in every direction. Factories and cars put much more pollution up into the air. Farmers started spraying everything they grew with an amazingly effective bug killer known as DDT, which was manufactured by the ton in a factory near the Santa Monica Bay. Ranchers, not to be outdone, started buying a new squirrel-killer called Compound 1080.
Koford returned to his study site in the mountains north of Los Angeles to find that an oil-drilling platform had been built on top of the pond the condors had once bathed in near his cabin. Access roads to other wells had been built and then widened. Mining companies were lusting after phosphate reserves, and hunters armed with army surplus rifles buzzed around like horseflies.
Koford noted the changes and went back to his birds. They seemed less common than they’d been before the war—smaller groups and fewer sightings—but there didn’t seem to be a way to test that observation. After interviewing ranchers and other locals and watching the birds, he guessed that at the end of World War II, between sixty and 120 condors were left. Later, his allies only mentioned the low end of that estimate, which was very low indeed. It meant that it would only take a small streak of bad luck to send the species into yet another downward spiral, and with all the changes going on in California, bad luck was certain. In other words, Koford wrote, people should be told that “the precarious natural balance of the population can be easily upset in the direction leading to extinction.”
Koford thought his field notes proved the need to separate the men from the birds. So did Alden Miller, Koford’s adviser after the death of Joseph Grinnell. Miller was an accomplished ornithologist whose conservation strategies were rarely questioned and often accepted as gospel. In public, he was formal to the point of seeming imperious at times; behind the scenes, he was known as an enemy you did not want to make. Miller fought ferociously for the things he held dear and true.
He didn’t think there was any doubt about what the condor needed. Like Koford and Grinnell, he thought the condor needed untouched wilderness and absolute isolation. Activities that might draw attention to the bird were not to be condoned. Miller felt strongly that photography was one of those activities, arguing at times that too many pictures of the birds had already been taken.
This new tactic put Koford at odds with his old friends and patrons Pemberton and Harrison. But when the war ended, Koford met Ian and Eben McMillan, who would eventually do more to promote the hands-off approach to condors than almost anyone else. Ian McMillan wrote that he was doing chores in his yard one day when Koford drove up in his broken-down jalopy and introduced himself. McMillan saw a “lean but well-built youth who turned out to be older than he looked.” Maybe it was the fine spring day or something in the way Koford moved that made McMillan think of old times: “The situation was somehow reminiscent of former days, when Kelly Truesdale would arrive at the old homesteading McMillan canyon with intriguing reports of his collecting adventures.”
The McMillans and Koford became fast friends. The writer Dave Darlington said Eben seemed to revel in Koford’s many eccentricities, including his habit of bursting into unexpected laughter and not telling anyone why. “He had a very peculiar sense of humor,” Eben told Darlington, adding he never once saw Koford in a coat, even when the ground was thick with snow.
He was always practicing self-discipline; it would have been pretty near impossible to sell him something he didn’t need. Koford was a totally objective person—he never joked, never said anything he didn’t mean, never went out on a limb…he was sort of a mechanical person—he had no human weaknesses. His integrity was untouchable, which made him unique in a society where integrity has lost its meaning.
Eben and Ian McMillan helped Koford meet Truesdale and many of Truesdale’s old competitors. Then they showed him how to get around. In the 1940s, no one knew the condor’s range like the McMillan boys did, and they passed all that knowledge on to Koford. They fed him and took care of him, and defended his work when Pemberton and Harrison faded from his life, and when Koford left the country in the 1950s, the McMillans spoke for him.
People who have made their way through all 3,500 pages of Carl Koford’s field notes say that his image of the condor seemed to change when he returned from the Pacific Theater. References to condors disturbed by people seemed to get a lot more common, as did the idea that condors were less sanguine than they looked:
One factor leading to a false idea of tameness of condors is the lag in reaction of the birds to disturbance. Commonly when a condor does not leave its perch as a consequence of a man close by, it will leave several minutes later when a man has walked several hundred feet away…
One man, by disturbing the birds at critical places during the day, can prevent roosting over an area of several square miles.
Koford said the condors were rattled by the sounds of trees being cut and the sounds of airplanes flying over their nest caves. “Even the buzz of a motion picture camera 100 yards from a perched adult appears to be noticed…,” he wrote. Still photographers were even more of a problem.
The failure of some nests known to me was probably due, at least in part, to the activity of these men. Even with great care, a party which I assisted kept the nesting adult from the egg or chick on some occasions. Other photographers were much less solicitous of the welfare of the birds and some of their activities were literally cruel. Even when photographing a bird with a large telephoto lens, one must be comparatively close to the subject…. There is little to be gained by attempting to obtain more photographs of these birds.
Koford’s study was hailed as definitive long before it was published by the National Audubon Society in 1952. In 1947, the federal government turned his study area into a 53,000-acre condor sanctuary, tearing out the hiking trails and locking out the fishermen and hunters. Koford was delighted until he heard that the place would be called the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, which was sure to draw the birders in.
It was on the maps and that’s where everybody thought they could go to see condors—including people like Roger Tory Peterson. He wrote in one of his books, “Well the condors have their sanctuary now.” As though a big sanctuary would take care of everything, even though the condors spent most of their time off the sanctuary, foraging on private lands.
Koford didn’t think anybody should be let near the condors, including researchers like him. Watching from a distance on a limited basis was probably okay, but getting close enough to be noticed was essentially an act of violence. Koford had also become convinced that there was no justification for entering the nest cave with a condor still inside it. He had done it so many times, but those were mistakes he did not want to see repeated.
This was not a notion that went over very well in the scientific community; many critics say it helped accelerate the birds’ decline. Noel Snyder, the leader of the California Condor Recovery Program for part of the eighties, called this philosophy “a curse that endured for nearly 30 years, totally inhibiting much needed research.”7
There’s no doubt that Koford helped to complicate the lives of the scientists who later tried to lay their hands on the last of the free-flying California condors. On the other hand, the condors would not have been out there if not for him. They would have been gone.