INTRODUCTION
1. The town once known as Piru City was built in the 1860s by a man named David Cook: stories about “Piru City,” California, can be found on the Web site of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society: www.scvhs.org.
CHAPTER ONE: THE WORST OF TIMES
1. A condor is [only] five percent feathers, flesh, blood and bone: open letter to Russell Peterson, National Audubon Society, from David Brower, Friends of the Earth, September 4, 1980.
2. He went after the basic mathematics underlying the Bureau’s proposals and uncovered embarrassing errors: taken from John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.
3. “Then came my lucky day”: David Brower’s account of finally seeing wild condors is taken from his essay, “Any Places That Are Wild,” from “The Uneasy Chair,” Earth Island Journal (Spring 1987).
CHAPTER TWO: WING IN A GRAVE
1. The Pleistocene epoch was the condor’s prime: descriptions of Pleistocene scavenging birds devouring the carcass of a mammoth are based in part on Fritz Hertle, “Diversity in Body Size and Feeding Morphology within Past and Present Vulture Assemblages,” Ecology 75, no. 4 (1944); and in part on Roger Caras, Source of the Thunder: The Biography of a California Condor, Little, Brown, 1970.
2. Is not the California condor a senile species: taken from Lloyd Miller’s essay, “Succession in the Cathartine Dynasty,” Univ. California Los Angeles, 1942.
CHAPTER THREE: MORE LIKE RELATIVES
1. Condors also play a crucial role in the stories: descriptions of condors with supernatural powers are taken from the following: E. W. Gifford and G. H. Block, “Above Old Man Destroys His First World, as told by the Wiyot Indians of Humboldt County,” and “The Making and Destroying of the World as told by the West Mono Indians of Madera County,” in Californian Indian Nights: Stories of the Creation of the World, of Man…, A. L. Clark Co., 1930, repr. Univ. Nebraska Press, 1990; Hubert H. Bancroft, “Myths and Languages,” The Native Races, vol. 3, A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1882; Dwight D. Simmons, “Interactions Between California Condors and Humans in Prehistoric Far Western America,” Vulture Biology and Management, Univ. California Berkeley, 1984; passages from Carroll De Wilton Scott, “Looking for California Condors,” 1935, 1945, ms. in Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; A. L. Kroeber, Indian Myths of South Central California, Univ. California Berkeley, 1907; E. W. Gifford, Miwok Cults, Univ. California Berkeley, 1926; and E. W. Gifford, Central Miwok Ceremonies, Univ. California Berkeley, 1955.
2. But the authors of a recent book on condors take a much more pessimistic view: rough calculations of the long-term effects of thousands of years of condor sacrifice practiced by Indian tribes are based on Noel Snyder and Helen Snyder, The California Condor: A Saga of Natural History and Conservation, Academic Press, 2000.
3. Not long afterward, an angry group of twenty activists and Indians gathered: descriptions of the fight between Chumash Indians not recognized by the federal government and the Fish and Wildlife Service are based in part on “Ceremonial Dance for Wild Condors atop Mt. Pinos, June 8, 1987,” press release, Earth First!, Earth Island Institute, Committee for Wild Condors, spring 1987; press release, Sept. 3, 1986, Quabajai Chumash Indian Association; Resolution Number 2–86, Native American Heritage Commission, “Memorandum: Chumash Indian/California Condor Program Controversy,” California Department of Fish and Game, 1986; letter from Sidney Flores, attorney representing Coastal Chumash Clan, August 1, 1986.
CHAPTER FOUR: SWAY OF KINGDOMS
1. Off the coast of Terrestrial Paradise, 1602: imagined description of a scurvy-ridden sailor thinking he sees griffins eating a dead whale on a beach in California is based in part on Harry Harris, “The Annals of Gymnogyps to 1900,” The Condor (Jan. 1941).
2. Alta California was God’s gift: descriptions of cattle in the Mission and Rancho eras are based in part on L. T. Burcham, California Range Land: An Historico-Ecological Study of the Range Resources of California, Div. of Forestry, State of California, 1957; and Tracy I. Storer and Lloyd P. Tevis, The California Grizzly, Univ. California Berkeley, 1995.
3. Then there were the grizzly bears: descriptions of grizzly bears and their interactions with condors are based in part on passages from Storer and Tevis, California Grizzly; Charles F. Outland, Mines, Murders and Grizzlies: Tales of California’s Ventura Back Country, 1969, repr. Ventura Co. Museum of History and Art, 1998; and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, “Grizzlies at the Calaveras,” in Ranch and Mission Days in Alta California, repr. in Don DeNevi, ed., Sketches of Early California, Chronicle Books, 1971.
4. There’s another key link between the condors and the bears: accounts of the importance of chaparral to the survival of both grizzlies and condors are based on Charles M. Goethe, The Elfin Forest: A Glimpse of California’s Chaparral, self-published, 1953; Fred G. Plummer, Chaparral: Studies in the Dwarf Forests, or Elfin-Wood, of Southern California, USDA Forest Service, 1911; and Storer and Tevis, California Grizzly.
CHAPTER FIVE: COLLATERAL DAMAGE
1. The California gold rush hit the condor’s world like a meteor from the East: early descriptions of the damage wrought by logging and mining come from miner and artist J. D. Borthwick, as cited by David Beesley in Crow’s Range: An Environmental History of the Sierra Nevada, Univ. Nevada Press, 2004.
2. Condors weren’t common in the flatlands: descriptions of the geographic damage done to the Sierra by the gold rush are based largely on “The Sierra Gold Made,” Beesley, Crow’s Range.
3. “Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples and sweep”: John Muir’s musings on the power of the wind after climbing up a tree in a heavy storm are taken from “A Wind Storm in the Forests,” The Mountains of California, Century Co., 1894.
4. Condors may also have nested in the trees in these grand forests: Muir’s description of the fires burning through the tops of giant forests in the night are taken from Edwin Way Teale, ed., The Wilderness World of John Muir, Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
5. The market for the wood of these giant trees: based on J. S. Holliday, Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California, Univ. California Berkeley, 1999.
6. One forty-niner described his wagon train as a rolling armory: Holliday, Rush for Riches.
7. Condors near the mining fields were shot dead for the hell of it: the account of miner and pony express rider Alonzo Winship sneaking up on a sleeping condor and whacking it about the head and neck with a shovel comes from M. L. Herman, “The Capture of a California Condor in El Dorado, Colorado,” The Condor 2, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1900).
8. Life got even harder for the condors in the 1850s: broad accounts of the damage done to California’s wildlife by “market-hunters” are taken from Holliday, Rush for Riches, and Raymond F. Dasman, “Environmental Changes before and after the Gold Rush,” in James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi, eds., A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, Univ. California Berkeley, 1999.
9. “There were five horses packed with buffalo robes”: accounts of the market hunt during which the famous outdoorsman and bear hunter James “Grizzly” Adams saw his first and last California condor are taken from Theodore Hittell, The Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California, Towne & Bacon, 1860.
10. California condors got meaner and bigger in the late 1800s: Alexander Taylor’s famously inaccurate description of “The Great Condor of Northwest America” as a carnivorous outlaw bird a cattle or sheep rancher had every right to shoot or poison was initially published in The California Farmer (Nov. 1854), and then republished in Hutchings’ California Magazine in March 1959.
11. Ornithologist Adolphus Heerman said that scenario repeated itself: from Pacific Railroad surveys as cited in Harris, “Annals of Gymnogyps to 1900.”
12. In most of the state, the grizzlies were in full retreat: accounts of grizzly hunting in the mountains of south-central California are from Outland, Mines, Murders and Grizzlies; Storer and Tevis, California Grizzly; Susan Snyder, Bear in Mind: The California Grizzly, Heyday Books, 2003; and Allen Kelly, Bears I Have Met—And Others, Drexel Biddle Publishers, 1903.
13. Even the law-abiding citizens seemed to be a little off: accounts of bandits terrorizing stages being hauled over the top of the pass that separates Southern Caifornia from the Great Central Valley come from John Robinson, “Tiburcio Vasquez in Southern California: The Bandit’s Last Hurrah,” California Territorial Quarterly, no. 1400 (Fall 1996).
14. Lechler also liked to stress that the first recorded gold strike: one of the few descriptions of the hollow see-through quill of a foot-long condor feather being used to carry and measure out gold dust comes from John Bidwell, Life in California before the Gold Discovery, Lewis Osborne, 1966 (written by Bidwell in the 1890s about the 1840s).
15. Apparently Cooper hadn’t seen the condor for eight years: the story of ornithologist J. G. Cooper’s encounter with a docile condor on a beach in what would later be known as Orange County comes from J. G. Cooper, “A Doomed Bird,” Zoe 1 (1890).
CHAPTER SIX: SKIN RECORD
1. When his short, spectacular career began in the early 1800s: descriptions of John K. Townsend’s life rely on the introduction to Townsend’s The Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, 1939, repr. Oregon State Univ. Press, 1999.
2. Thrilled to finally see the bird he’d dreamed of in the flesh: the story of his fight with a wounded condor in Oregon was told by Townsend himself in “California Vulture,” The Literary Record and Journal of the Linnean Society of Pennsylvania College 4, no. 12 (Oct. 1848).
3. No one would have questioned Townsend’s need to kill: books that did a lot to shape my attitudes toward this era include Barbara Mearns and Richard Mearns, The Bird Collectors, Academic Press, 1998.
4. All but one of the condors that were sent overseas left the country as carcasses: the imagined account of the voyage taken by the only living condor ever to be shipped overseas is based primarily on Harris’s “Annals of Gymnogyps to 1900.”
5. The only group the scientists did not blame was their own: accounts of the life and work of Joseph P. Grinnell come from the following sources: Alden Miller, “Joseph Grinnell,” Systematic Zoology 13, no. 4 (Dec. 30, 1964); Joseph Grinnell, “Old Fort Tejon,” The Condor 7 (Jan.–Feb. 1905); Joseph Grinnell, Joseph Grinnell’s Philosophy of Nature: Selected Writings of a Western Naturalist, Univ. California Press, 1943.
6. California’s condor owners said their birds could do all that and more: stories about pet condors, especially the bird known as the General, come from the following sources: Frank H. Holmes, “A Pet Condor,” The Nidologist (date unknown); William L. Finley, “Home Life of the California Condor,” The Century Magazine 75, no. 3 (Jan. 1908); William L. Finley, “Life History of the California Condor,” The Condor 10, no. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1908); and William L. Finley, “The Passing of the California Condor,” The Condor (1926).
CHAPTER SEVEN: EGGMEN
1. I have a picture of an egg collector on my desk: most of what I know about eggs of condors I learned from Lloyd Kiff, a former oologist who now works for the Peregrine Fund. Kiff very kindly lent me the unpublished studies he has done of almost every collected condor egg now in existence.
2. A flat wooden tray full of birds’ eggs rests in Kelly Truesdale’s lap: the rest of what I know about the egg collector Kelly Truesdale comes from Ian McMillan, Man and the California Condor, E. P. Dutton, 1968, or from William Dawson’s account of a condor egg–collecting trip he took with Truesdale once; that account is part of Dawson’s massive study, The Birds of California, South Moulton Company of Los Angeles, 1923.
3. Kelly Truesdale starred in some of the best pulp nonfiction: accounts of some of the crazy things egg collectors used to do are taken mostly from Joseph Kastner, A World of Watchers: An Informal History of the American Passion for Birds, Sierra Club Books, 1986; articles that also shaped my thoughts included Harry H. Dunn, “How I Found the Nest of a Condor,” The American Boy (Feb. 1907) and H. G. Rising, “The Capture of a California Condor,” The Bulletin of the Cooper Ornithological Club 1, no. 2 (Spring 1889).
4. “ And as he drove back to headquarters”: the quote is from Earle Crow, Men of El Tejon, Ward Ritchie Press, 1957.
5. Everyone who’s ever lived in these small towns: the story of the St. Francis dam disaster is best told in Charles F. Outland’s Man-Made Disaster: The Story of St. Francis Dam, A. H. Clark Co., 1963.
CHAPTER EIGHT: CARL KOFORD
1. The best thing that can happen: introductory quote and others that clearly follow are from H. H. Sheldon, “What Price Condor?” Field & Stream (Sept. 1939).
2. The jolting launch makes the pilot and crew of the plane: quotes I imagine Koford thinking while he’s flying a scout plane in World War II are based on Carl Koford, The California Condor, Dover, 1953.
3. Carl Koford is the patron saint of condor field research: notes taken by Koford in the field are transcribed from a copy of his field notes kept at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley.
4. Koford hitched his first ride into condor country in the spring of 1939: the letters of introduction from Joseph Grinnell that Koford carried in the field were supplied by the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley.
5. “Carl was frugal”: Ian McMillan’s description of Koford’s beat-up car comes from McMillan, Man and the California Condor.
6. These two men were Koford’s best friends in the field at the time: allegations that Koford often handled condors in their nests before the start of World War II are based on films the late Ed Harrison showed me in his office, and photographs Koford took of Harrison in the back of a cave at the Sespe Condor Sanctuary, holding the condor chick known as Oscar.
7. This was not a notion that went over very well in the scientific community: my views of Koford’s complicated legacy were shaped by an unpublished manuscript provided by Roland Clement, former science director at the National Audubon Society; by Snyder and Snyder, The California Condor; and by the text of the only lengthy interview Carl Koford ever sat for, in David Phillips and Hugh Nash, eds., The Condor Question: Captive or Forever Free? Friends of the Earth, 1981.
CHAPTER NINE: HANDS-ON
1. Ian McMillan was removed from this committee: McMillan’s statement about being kicked off the scientific review panel set up to monitor Sibley’s work comes from an interview with McMillan published in Phillips and Nash, The Condor Question.
2. Sibley and McMillan never got the chance to talk about becoming allies: accounts of Sibley’s fieldwork and his struggles to get along with hands-off condor activists, the U.S. Forest Service, and local business groups pushing for permission to dam the river that runs through the condor’s breeding grounds are based partly on e-mail exchanges, but mostly on the regular reports Sibley sent to the Endangered Species Wildlife Station at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.
3. Topa Topa hasn’t seen the wild since: some of the descriptions of Topa Topa misbehaving at the Los Angeles Zoo come from the unpublished “Notes on the Behavior of Topa Topa,” written for the zoo by former condor keeper Frank Todd in 1971.
4. The Sespe Creek project skidded off the tracks in the summer of 1967: McMillan’s claim that the public vote against building the Sespe dam project was a sign of the environmental times comes from his book Man and the California Condor.
5. McMillan and his allies failed to thank Fred Sibley for helping to nail this coffin shut: Sibley’s claim that the dam will drive the condor extinct is made in a report entitled “Effects of the Sespe Creek Project on the California Condor,” August 1969.
6. Sibley quit his job as a condor biologist: accounts of how Fred Sibley lost his job come from numerous sources.
CHAPTER TEN: CONTINGENCIES
1. A story on the Internet started me down this path of inquiry: Dave Boehi, “Mr. Wilbur Loves the Condor” can be found online at www.wwcmagazine.org, which is affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ.
2. Wilbur defined these drastic steps in a Contingency Plan: references to the fight over whether to permit phosphate mining in the condor refuge are based on various news reports and an internal memo on an August 3, 1970, meeting involving various government agencies and representatives of the mining industry and the National Audubon Society.
3. But the activists were outraged by the “last-ditch” actions: reports on the internal debate over whether to include a last-ditch captive breeding plan in the updated version of the California Condor Recovery Plan required by the U.S. Endangered Species Act are described at length by Sanford R. Wilbur in his self-published Condor Tales: What I Learned in Twelve Years with the Big Birds, 2004.
4. “The existence of the California condor depends on conscientious human intervention”: quotes from the panel of “independent” scientists asked to review the condor’s status and recommend conservation priorities are taken from “Audubon Conservation Report No. 6: Report of the Advisory Panel on the California Condor,” June 1978.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ENDGAME
1. A scientific SWAT team rolled into the Sespe in the summer of 1980: accounts of the events that led to the capture of the last wild condor in 1987 are as numerous as they are varied. Noel Snyder’s point of view is laid out quite extensively in The California Condor; David Darlington, a hands-off activist, profiled the legendary activist/ranchers Eben and Ian McMillan in his book In Condor Country, Henry Holt, 1987. Other accounts can be found in Phillips and Nash, The Condor Question and Wilbur’s Condor Tales.
2. Snyder was right about the activists: Eben McMillan’s letter to Governor Edmund G. Brown was found in a filing cabinet at a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regional office in Ventura, California.
3. Brower and Phillips asked to see the film of the disaster: David Brower’s side of the arguments that followed the accidental killing of a condor chick in its nest by a USFWS biologist are recounted in Phillips and Nash, The Condor Question, which includes written statements between Dave Phillips of Friends of the Earth and Bill Lehman, the government biologist in whose arms the chick died.
4. Brower and his colleagues jumped all over that claim: open exchanges between Brower and Lehman and a telegram Brower sent to Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus are also published in Phillips and Nash, The Condor Question.
5. The California Condor Recovery team did a huge amount of living on condor time: accounts of what the field teams did until the state permits that allowed them to trap condors, fit them with radio transmitters, and ultimately take them to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo are based in part on field notes taken by the members of the condor field teams.
6. Condor country had become a risky place for condors: Audubon’s reluctance to allow all the birds to be taken into captivity is justified in an internal memo sent to some of the leaders of the condor program.
7. More ugliness followed: exchanges between Marsha Hobbs of the Los Angeles Zoo and Peter Berle of the National Audubon Society are based on dueling press releases and news reports.
CHAPTER TWELVE: ZOO
1. The condor in the kennel behind the front seat: almost all this chapter is based on interviews with scientists and others at the Los Angeles Zoo, the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species at the San Diego Zoo, and the people who work in the Captive Breeding Center at the Peregrine Fund . But my opinions were no doubt shaped indirectly by the following written materials: Janny Scott, “An Attractive Bird? Condor Passes Health; Mate to be Picked,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1987; Nancy Ray, “Ambitious Plan Is Last Hope to Rescue Bird from Extinction,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1982; William D. Toone, “Rodan Revisited,” Zoo News, San Diego Zoo, December 1981; “Cathartid Feeding Protocol,” 1985 memo, Los Angeles Zoo; Michael Soule and J. Verner, “Population goals for the California Condor,” unpublished report, March 16, 1987; and Sanford Wilbur and Jerome Jackson, eds., Vulture Biology and Management, Univ. California Berkeley, 1983.
2. The point of the article was in the headline itself: Bil Gilbert, “Why Don’t We Pull the Plug on the Condor and Ferret?” Discover (July 1986).
3. Kiff had signed off on the recovery plan: the legal claim that the California condor has been “technically extinct” since the last free-flying bird was captured in 1987 has never been pursued by the Tejon Ranch, but I’m told that it is still on file at the USFWS Sacramento office.
4. In 1989, these gathering land-use fights were postponed by a controversial experiment: accounts of the debate over whether Andean condors should be released “to hold the habitat” until the California birds were ready to return are found in Wilbur, Condor Tales; Snyder and Snyder, The California Condor; and various news reports, including David Smollar, “Can Andean Condor Help Save California Kin?” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 7, 1986.
5. Early April, 1988: some of what I know about the first hatching of a California condor egg laid in captivity comes from “Condor Chick Stuck in Egg, Scientists Stand by to Help,” wire reports, Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1988; and “Healthy Condor Hatches in San Diego,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 30, 1988.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: GRAND CANYON
1. When Robert Mesta saw himself hanging in effigy: Robert Mesta’s account of the disastrous meeting in Kanab is confirmed by news accounts and angry letters to the editors of various local papers.
2. This was the mood in Fredonia when the condor plan was officially unveiled in 1995: the writing of this chapter was also shaped by the Peregrine Fund’s “A Review of the First Five Years of the California Condor Reintroduction Program”; Christopher Woods, Shawn Farry, and William Henrich, “Survival of Juvenile and Subadult Condors Released in Arizona,” unpublished, 2001; and by the arguments of Vicky J. Meretsky, Steven Beissinger, Noel Snyder, David Clendenen, and James Wiley, “The California Condor: A Flagship Adrift,” Conservation Biology (August 2000).
3. New groups of condors were released on a regular basis: Shawn Farry’s accounts of the incredible amounts of work involved in managing condors match what he wrote in his field notes.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: NOT THE SAME BIRD
1. Farry paused to explain why the friendly condors were the most at risk: accounts of condors landing on everything from power lines to airport runways were gleaned from various news reports and interviews with representatives of the California Condor Recovery program.
2. Burnett said he’d been worrying about these birds since the day they arrived: efforts to “train” the birds to act like “wild” condors were gathered the same way as above.
3. Snyder’s findings came as no surprise: reactions inside the condor program to the publication of Meretsky et al., “The California Condor: A Flagship Adrift,” and then to Snyder and Snyder, The California Condor, are described in unpublished letters to the editor of the journal Conservation Biology.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE REAL KILLERS
1. The energy company that wanted to build this was called Enron: my account of the fight over whether to allow the Enron Corporation to build so-called condor Cuisinarts in the middle of the condors’ feeding range are based on various news accounts and press releases and on interviews with representatives of the National Audubon Society and the Tejon Ranch. I was unable to reach anyone who would agree to speak for Enron.
2. Snyder says the problem is lead shot in the carcasses of animals: the crises that ensued when at least six California condors contracted potentially lethal cases of lead poisoning after eating from what may have been a single but unknown food source was described at length by Farry in unpublished field notes and sharply criticized by Snyder and his allies in news reports and interviews.
3. So what were the clues?: studies that should have raised alarms over the possible links between the use of lead shot by hunters and the unexplained deaths of condors have been in play since at least late 1986, when O. H. Pattee, P. H. Bloom, J. Michael Scott, and Milton R. Smith published “Lead Hazards with the Range of the California Condor,” The Condor 92. More recent studies include V. J. Meretsky et al., “Demography of the California Condor: Implications for Reestablishment,” Conservation Biology (2000); and Michael Fry, “Assessment of Lead Contamination Sources Exposing California Condors,” submitted to the California Department of Fish and Game, April 7, 2003.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: ELVIS REENTERS THE BUILDING
1. The plan to put Igor back where he had come from was approved in December 2002: interviews conducted at the California Condor Recovery team meeting at the Los Angeles Zoo in December 2001 were augmented by extensive written materials distributed at that meeting.