When condors bred in zoos don’t act like condors in the wild, Les Reid tends to gloat. “We told the zoos not to lock the condors up,” he said. “We said, ‘Hey, leave them out in the wild so they can teach the young condors to survive.’ They said ‘Oh no, we can’t do that. We’ve spent God knows how many millions of dollars setting up all of these captive propagation facilities where we’re raising young birds with puppets and such, and we don’t want to waste that money now, do we?’”
Reid is a retired pipe fitter and a former member of the board of directors of the Sierra Club. With his wife, Sally, he helped ensure the protection of huge parts of the condor’s range in the early 1960s by goading the California state legislature into passing a historic wilderness protection law. Reid said he did it partly to save the condors he and his wife often saw while hiking in the mountains of south-central California. “Those were the real birds,” Reid said. “Not like now. Two miles up in the sky, barely moving, none of those radio gizmos hanging off their wings. That’s the way you’re supposed to see a condor.”
The Reids used to argue that condors had certain rights. First among them was the right to lead wild and unfettered lives. In retrospect, it’s more than likely that this approach would have led directly to extinction, but Reid is not the kind of guy who tends to give a hoot about the experts. He’s the kind of guy you want next to you in the trenches, cracking sick jokes about the enemy.
In his case, the enemy was (and is) the zoological community. Since the 1980s, he’s been charging that zoos were out to make money off the condor, breeding them in cages and selling them to the highest bidder. This is a ridiculous and completely unsupportable charge, but Reid keeps making it: “Condors in Taiwan and Kuwait and such. I’m telling you I wouldn’t be surprised.”
I admire Les and Sally Reid. Like the McMillan brothers, they were antidotes to claims that the environmental movement was an upper-class plot to steal the people’s land. When extractive industries tried to use that argument to get at the condor’s habitat, Les and a few of his pipe-fitter friends were happy to tell them that they had no idea what they were talking about.
The Reids retired to a modest home on the outskirts of a small California community called Pine Mountain Club in the early 1980s—a simple, sturdy A-frame with a wonderful view and a bedroom built into the rafters. They were living there when the last wild condor was trapped in 1987, and when the first group of zoo-bred birds was released 1992. Sally and Les didn’t bother to go looking for the zoo-bred birds, because to them, they weren’t really condors.
Sally Reid was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years after that. When her husband got too old to care for her, he was forced to move her to a managed care facility in Bakersfield, several hours’ drive away. When Sally started fading in the late 1990s, Les often drove out to Bakersfield to see her several mornings a week. Usually he turned around and drove back to the A-frame in the afternoon. That’s what he was doing when I parked my car in the driveway of his home in March 2002.
On the far side of this mountain, to the south, the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area was dealing with yet another warm, smoggy day. But on Reid’s side it was snowing. When nobody came to his door, I took a walk in the snow, marveling at the size of the thick wet flakes. Then I got back into the car and fell asleep listening to a Neil Young album called Zuma. The bass solo at the start of the song “Cortez the Killer” always makes me think of condors rising in the wind.
When I woke up, a wiry old gray-haired man in work clothes was banging on the window of the car. “You’re that reporter fella? Well come on in then. Let’s start talkin!”
Reid unrolled his story as he unlocked his front door. It started in the early 1990s, after he’d unlocked this very same door and walked into his house. Right away he knew there was something wrong. After adjusting his hearing aid, he heard a bunch of ripping and bumping noises coming from behind the bedroom door, up at the top of the stairs.
“I thought it was the cat,” said Reid. “Then I saw the cat right in front of me. That’s when I went up the stairs as quiet as I could, pulled the door open a crack, and peeked inside.”
Eight black birds with leathery heads and white triangles under their wings were staring back at Reid—eight young California condors, all on his bed. While Reid had been out visiting his wife they’d ripped a hole in the screen door connected to a small deck off the bedroom, pushing their way in and hopping up onto the bed. After ripping at the mattress and the sheets for a while, the birds froze when the door moved. One had a chunk of mattress hanging off its beak. Another appeared to be eating a pair of Reid’s underpants.
“I said, ‘Okay, boys, you’re not supposed to be here. You’re going to have to leave.’ They just stood there staring back at me for a minute or two. Then they turned around and went back out through the hole in the screen. One by one, like a bunch of kids, without any argument at all. I closed the glass door and before long they had their beaks against it, like, ‘Hey! Why can’t we come in here?’ They were lucky it was me.”
The birds inspected Les Reid’s deck. They walked back and forth on the railing. After a few hours they flew away. Then they came back. This is how it went for a couple of years, and Reid was grateful. He liked it when the young birds opened their wings to take in sunny days, basking and moving only their heads. He liked it when they stomped around on his roof, on the railings. He watched them through a sliding glass door for hours, making up names for individual birds. It made him feel young.
“They had this thing they did with the umbrella,” he said. “I’ve got this big umbrella at one end of the deck and the condors kept trying to stand on it. One flies off the roof and lands on top of the umbrella, but it’s too slippery and the condor falls off onto the deck, and then another bird tries to do the same thing and falls off just like the first one. They were having fun out there.”
Les Reid knows he should have chased the condors off his deck, but he didn’t even try. When government biologists came around he told them to get lost. Then he posted NO TRESPASSING signs all over his property. “The Department of Fish and Game would call and ask me to tell them what numbers were on the birds’ tags and I’d say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that, it’s none of your goddamned business what the numbers are.’ And hang up. They’d call back and say, ‘We’ll get you for that, Reid,’ and I’d say, ‘No you won’t. That’d be the biggest story the local papers ever had.’”
Why the condors picked this particular house is not completely clear. Part of the attraction had to be the sweeping view of the mountains to the west and the north. Another part may have been a steady supply of raw meat from the grocery store. Government biologists have repeatedly charged that Reid was feeding the condors, noting that meat sales at the local deli spiked when the birds were around.
Reid swore he wasn’t feeding anything except himself and the cat. He knew feeding condors was both illegal and a stupid thing to do. Anyway, people who did it ran the risk of seeing chunks of their own flesh bitten off, and the additional risk of being arrested and fined. Condors also pay a price when they start homing in on heaping plates of ground sirloin: they lose the desire to act like wild birds. Why spend the whole day flying around when you know the old guy with the view is throwing meat on his back porch? Why not land on that unattended picnic table and scarf down the bucket of fried chicken?
“I would never feed them,” Reid said again, looking more than slightly pissed off. “And don’t go blaming people like me for messing up the condors. They were defective when they left the zoos. Okay?”
I don’t know exactly what Les Reid meant when he used that word “defective,” and I don’t think he did, either. But when the first of several different groups of condors settled in on his deck in 1998, it was clear that the zoos and the field biologists, not to mention the birds themselves, had a very serious problem. Condors released near the Sespe had been buzzing passing cars, slicing open garbage cans, walking through crowded business districts, and generally acting like a gang of bored punks.
The birds released in Arizona were having problems of their own, frequenting campsites and cluttering up the entrance to an old uranium mine. Shawn Farry was repeatedly forced to flush recalcitrant birds out of Fredonia and Kanab, chasing them past the homes of unemployed people who blamed endangered species for their problems.
Those are the stories I was able to confirm; the rumors were even better: A condor lands in a small town in Southern California and walks into a bank, terrifying tellers and drawing police. A condor in northern Arizona eats a sandwich in the front seat of a Park Service pickup truck and then poses for a picture. A condor at the Hualapai Reservation in Arizona lingers near an airport runway until it is locked inside the pilot’s lounge; by the time a field biologist from the Peregrine Fund arrives on the scene, the pilot’s lounge has been destroyed and the condor is standing on a chair staring at a television tuned to NBC, which was showing pictures of the war in Kosovo. As far as I can tell, those first two stories are completely false, even though one of them came out of the mouth of a so-called media specialist hired by the Fish and Wildlife Service. But the third one’s true, Farry says.
Farry thought reporters asked him way too many questions about the condor hijinks. Every time we talked, he stressed that many of the birds seemed wild from the start. Those were the condors that never slept on ledges the coyotes could reach, and the ones that never seemed to lose the wind. Farry didn’t have to climb down and get those birds out of the bottoms of windless canyons, and he never had to jump the metal guardrail and chase them off the boulders in front of the El Tovar Hotel and Lounge on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. That was also a stupid thing to do, given that a slip could easily send him bouncing down a two-mile cliff. Crowds of gaping tourists often gathered while he worked. Usually they rooted for the birds.
Farry paused to explain why the friendly condors were the most at risk. Birds that flew toward humans and the things they built were probably the first to be “accidentally” shot by folks who didn’t recognize them, and among the first to suffer when the human world jumped up in front of them. Out in California, one of these condors died after slurping up what was probably antifreeze. And for a while the zoo-bred birds seemed dangerously fond of electric power poles. The view from the tops of these poles was very good, but coming and going was a problem—condors that ignored or did not see the lines kept slamming right into them and killing themselves. One bird almost sliced a wing off; another was nearly decapitated. One hit the positive power line with the tip of an outstretched wing, causing the bird to flip up and over and down onto the rest of the lines. When the other wing hit the negative current, the body of the condor shook violently for a moment. The accident caused the power to go out in the town of Fillmore, in Ventura County.1
Some of the people in uniforms hated doing this work. The man who seemed to hate it most was Dave Clendenen, the lead biologist in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary. Clendenen had been with the condor program since the mid-1980s, ruining his back on those endless zombie patrols and fighting on Noel Snyder’s side in the bitter interoffice battles. By the late 1990s, he had spent more time in the field that any other biologist, including Carl Koford. He would do anything to help these birds.
But not this. This was absurd. Clendenen said he felt like a fool when he tried to explain “aversion therapy” to tourists or neighbors.
“I didn’t join the Fish and Wildlife Service so I could throw sticks at birds,” he said. “Especially when all they did was wait for you to go away. It was obvious to me that we weren’t getting very far training condors to act like wild birds, because they weren’t wild birds anymore. They weren’t the same condors I had known when they were wild.”
Clendenen helped restore the California condors in 1992. A few months later he helped capture the condors that were still alive so they could be sent back to the zoo. Then he helped release a second group, much deeper into the sanctuary. It was some of these birds that showed up on Les Reid’s porch. Clendenen called Mike Wallace, now at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, on a more or less regular basis to say that there was something wrong with the birds. Wallace told him to wait. The newly released condors were too young to be interested in breeding, and they didn’t have a parent to teach them how to act in the wild, so naturally this transition was going to take a while.
The most consistent troublemakers were the young birds that tended to travel in gangs. These birds weren’t interested in pairing off and searching for a starter cave, and like all the zoo-bred condors, they were provided with a steady supply of easy-to-find carcasses. So what did they do all day? Basically, they wandered around playing follow the leader, and the leader was often the least cautious condor in the group. Wallace, then the scientist in charge of the condor reintroduction program, said these young and restless groups of birds did exactly what a pack of young and restless humans would do: “They were like a bunch of teenagers whose parents left town without hiding the keys to the sports car,” he said. “They’re going to fire that baby up and cruise around town.”
Wallace liked this metaphor because it implied that these problems would fade as the birds got older. When they started finding mates and tending fledglings, they’d have no time to mess around. Wallace said as much when exasperated field crews called him for advice. Hang in there and wait a bit, he told them. Give the birds a year or two and they’ll repent their foolish ways.
Wallace was aware that this approach would fail if the birds kept making lethal mistakes. To solve that problem, he made some changes at the captive breeding centers. He wanted condors coming out of zoos to know that power lines were very bad, and that people were to be avoided. He didn’t think it would be difficult to pound these attitudes into the birds, and so he set to work.
Not long afterward, a fledgling condor was minding its own business in an off-exhibit flight pen at the Los Angeles Zoo, waiting for its daily meal of vitamin-fortified horsemeat, when a hidden door in the plywood fence flew open, and a bunch of angry-looking people rushed in. They chased the condor around the enclosure and then into a corner, yelling insults and waving their arms. Then they grabbed the bird and held it tight. Wallace stuck a needle in the bird’s left leg. The condor tried to bite him, but it couldn’t move.
Wallace held the needle steady in the vein until the plastic tube was full of blood. He opened the bird’s beak and looked into the mouth. He put his thumbs near the condor’s eyes and pulled the skin back, looking for injuries and signs of disease. Then, on his signal, the other keepers dropped the bird and ran away, slamming the door behind them.
A few days later, this same bird saw that an attractive new perch had appeared at the other end of its pen—a round, brown wooden pole, tall and not too thick, that looked like it’d been soaked in something black and smudgy. A short horizontal board was attached to the top of the pole. Evenly spaced whitish knobs were attached to the horizontal board. Long thin wires stretched forward from these knobs, disappearing into the far wall.
The bird leaned forward, flapped twice, and landed on the pole. When it landed, an awful shock flashed up through its body. The condor bounced up into the air, hissing, flapping wildly. When it settled back onto the new perch it got another painful jolt and bounced off again.
This was a type of the “aversion therapy” that Clendenen so hated. Wallace launched these programs just before he left the Los Angeles Zoo to run the condor program at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Basically, he taught the other keepers to abuse the birds without actually hurting them. Sometimes that meant charging into big groups of condors, causing the birds to fall to the ground or bolt and slam into walls. Sometimes it meant catching the birds and stuffing them into crates. Wallace also told his crew to run in every now and then and shake everything the birds tried to roost on. Condors soon to be released were mugged repeatedly.
“You wanted to keep them off-balance psychologically,” Wallace said. “If we did the same thing every time, we wouldn’t be as scary.”
Wallace was encouraged by the early results he got from the hazing and aversion-therapy sessions, and so he asked the field crews to try them in the wild. But when the field crews tried to bother the birds as Wallace had, the condors were not nearly so predictably scared.
Summer 1996: Several hundred miles up the coast from Los Angeles, near the top of a mountain carpeted with chaparral, Joe Burnett waited for a group of photographers to finish climbing into a camouflaged blind. Farther down the mountain, reporters and dignitaries waited for the historic moment. When Burnett heard that everyone was finally in position, he pulled a rope that opened a door on the front of wooden release pen; four young condors hatched and reared in zoos flew out over the trees.
These condors were the first to see the mountains near Big Sur in fifty years. Long-dead naturalists had written of condors that dined at the bottom of the stark rock cliffs that rose up out of the Pacific, jostling for position and cleaning out the carcasses of whales and elephant seals. It was said that meals like those were once made possible by great white sharks that gorged themselves on local marine mammal colonies, ravaging the breeding grounds and leaving the half-eaten dead. Zoo-bred condors didn’t have the flying skills needed to make it down to those rocks, and if they did make it down, they would never get back up. The condors in the box in front of Burnett would be fed on the carcasses of stillborn cattle collected from local dairies. Volunteers would drive these carcasses into the wilderness areas, and then chain them to the sides of hills reshaped by countless herds of cattle.
Burnett had been hired by the Ventana Wilderness Society, a nonprofit conservation group that had just finished reintroducing golden eagles to these same mountains. He was then a twenty-something kid from Virginia who had come to California to work with bald eagles and ended up more or less living his dream. Keeping company with condors wasn’t quite what he had expected, but that only made it more exciting.
“I’m sitting there waiting for the birds to soar up into the clouds while everybody oohs and ahhs,” said Burnett. “‘Oh, the mysterious condor,’ that kind of thing. What they do instead is fly straight over to the blind with the photographers in it and land right on top of the thing. Then they lean over and stick their heads in the openings we made for the cameras. It was like, ‘Hello! You’re busted in there!’ I was thinking ‘Oh shit, this isn’t right.’”
Burnett said he’d been worrying about these birds since the day they arrived. One of the birds seemed sluggish to him, and there was something vaguely odd about the other three. He couldn’t say why, but these condors looked a little slow to him, as if they were waiting to be told exactly what to do.2
None of these young condors had ever spent time with an adult member of their species. They had all been raised by condor puppets attached to the hands of captive breeders; after that, they’d only seen each other. Burnett called Wallace, who gave him his standard line: relax and wait.
Burnett said he spent the next several months trying to keep a bunch of “shoelace nibbling” condors out of trouble. He kept them from ending up splattered all over the windshields of the trucks and sports cars flying up and down the Pacific Coast Highway and pulled them out of nasty stretches of dried-out chaparral. At one point, he found them sitting in some trees near a bunch of naked sunbathers at the famous New Age spa called the Esalen Institute: “All I could think was, ‘Man I hope they know these people aren’t dead yet,’” he said. Burnett said that the owners of the institute were very understanding, even though he was dressed like a commando and armed with a “net gun” that looked like a bazooka. “They asked me to stay in the bushes,” he said. “That was fun up until the end, when I saw the birds up on the roof of one of the buildings. I climbed up onto the roof and snuck up on them and fired the net and ran over to the edge of the roof to get them and there were about forty people standing right below us. Most of them had clothes on.”
Eventually he threw a fit, calling Wallace to tell him he was sick of cleaning up after puppet-reared birds. Wallace said he’d take another look at how the birds were being raised in the captive breeding programs. The puppet-trained birds were captured and replaced by a group of slightly older condors that had been raised by adult birds. They were the only group of condors in the wild raised exclusively by real birds.
This group stayed out of trouble. When it got around that this was happening, Burnett got a call from the man who had published more peer-reviewed studies of the condor than everyone else combined. Burnett had never talked to Noel Snyder before, but he’d heard all about his exploits in the Sespe Sanctuary in the 1980s. Snyder explained that he’d rekindled his interest in the California Condor Program, partly because of complaints from friends still in the field. At the moment, he was working on a broad review of the recovery program, and he wanted to come and see the Ventana birds.
“I told him, sure, no problem,” said Burnett. “He was here for several days. I was pretty sure we had a problem with the puppet birds at that point, but when Noel’s paper came out, it seemed like he was trying to close down the program. I thought he really overdid it.”
The broad review was published in the August 2000 issue of Conservation Biology, a scientific journal. Next to Sndyer’s name were the names of several coauthors, including Dave Clendenen, who’d just quit his job in the Sespe Sanctuary, and Vicky Meretsky, a computer-modeling specialist at Indiana University, who’d worked with free-flying condors in the 1980s. After plugging everything she knew about the birds into a new computer model, Meretsky had concluded that the most expensive endangered-species-protection program in American history was about to crash and burn. Misbehaving condors were dying in the wild with alarming frequency, she found. “Good” birds were being led astray. The birds had not improved with age, as hoped for, and there wasn’t any evidence that change was on the way. Extinction wasn’t likely, but if present trends continued, success was out of the question.
“The program had become a stocking operation,” Snyder said. “Birds were dying in the wild at the same rate that they were coming out of the captive breeding programs. Success was still a possibility, but not without major changes.”
Snyder and his coauthors charged that many of these problems could be traced back to the puppet-raised birds. According to the paper, the birds weren’t fooled by the imitation parent birds—they knew there were human hands inside those beaks, and human heads behind the mirrored windows. These were the birds that headed straight for people when they were released to the wild, the paper surmised. Puppet-reared birds that got in trouble had been led astray, the authors said. For proof, consider the Big Sur program, where birds reared only by live parent-birds were acting like condors were supposed to act.
In interviews, Snyder and his colleagues said the condor program was becoming “a perpetual and very expensive black hole.” Reversing the trend meant rebooting the entire program. All of the condors in the wild needed to be captured and returned to the zoos. After that, more birds could be released. Since there was no hope for the puppet-reared birds, they’d have to stay in the zoos for the rest of their lives.
Snyder’s findings came as no surprise. He aired his concerns at what I’ve heard described as an “excruciatingly tense” meeting of the condor recovery team, and in the book he had just published. But the harshness of the paper knocked the program for a loop, which was quickly followed by an uproar. People with the program questioned the strength of Meretsky’s modeling work and the accuracy of some of her key data. Snyder and Wallace, once close friends, are now said to be the bitterest of enemies.3
When I met with Wallace in San Diego in March 2002, he tried to give Snyder his due. “I think the recovery program is in better shape because of the paper and the book,” he said. “I don’t agree with the conclusions, but we needed a kick in the pants. We made a lot of changes at the captive breeding center after Noel started in on us. We would have made the changes anyway, but not so fast.”
The changes Wallace made aren’t anywhere near as drastic as the ones Snyder wanted, but Wallace said they’ve helped. Young birds are released with older ones, and puppet-reared birds are never released without at least one parent-reared bird. Keepers who work the puppets try much harder to avoid being seen, and the puppets have a new personality.
“When we started doing this, the puppet birds were always very gentle with their young, but that’s not what the real parents do. If a chick does something wrong, the parent lets it know. It’s like Pow, a whack in the head. Gotta teach those little guys some discipline, you know?”
Back in the Ventana Wilderness, Joe Burnett has also seen some changes. He still chases condors out of residential neighborhoods, but these days that’s relatively rare. He said that as the birds have aged, they’ve learned to do some of the things condors did in the old days. When I asked him what he meant, he drove me down to the edge of the cliffs.
“See that beach down there?” he said. “About a year ago we stopped getting signals on the radio tags on a couple of puppet-reared condors. We drove around for a long time trying to pick up a signal, and then we got this tiny little blip while we were driving past these cliffs. I make it out to where we’re standing now and there they are at the bottom of the cliff, hammering away at the carcass of a sea lion. I saw the giant wings and a lot of blood and it was amazing. I mean this was something condors weren’t supposed to be able to do anymore.”
It was at just about this time that Les Reid’s condors stopped coming around. Reid said he was glad they’d finally figured out which end was supposed to be up. But I think he missed them dearly.