Condor (10 page)

Grinnell did not want to see the budding science of ecology turned into a hobby pursued by “dilettantes,” “amateurs,” and “extreme sentimentalists.” Bird protectionists were to be thanked for responding to turn-of-the-century warnings of the damage being done by the market hunters and ladies wearing big feathered hats, but now Grinnell thought the activists went too far when they tried to plug the scientists' guns. Eastern states were then considering plans to ban all forms of bird collecting, lest more species go the way of the extinct passenger pigeon. Grinnell agreed that for the
rarest birds, the collectors should be forced to make exceptions: “Limitations may be properly imposed…by excepting species like the Ivory-billed woodpecker or the Carolina parakeet.”

Every time I read those words I wonder why Grinnell didn't put the condor on his short list of critically endangered bird species, given the widespread hunch that the condor was already over the edge. Grinnell was never shy about speaking his mind, and he had special interest in the condor: in his teens he spent countless hours watching an active nest site he'd discovered near the town of Pasadena. “It's an out-of-the-way corner of the mountains, so I think they are safe,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in May 1905. “I and my boys who know of this have agreed to leave these birds strictly alone; so that unless some fool gunner gets a shot at them they will doubtless nest in the same place next year.”

Grinnell was a scientific prodigy, famous for his fieldwork and his skin collection by the time he was old enough to drink. Stories have been told about the time he memorized a thick book of scientific terms, and of how he once looked out of the moving buggy he was in and announced that local kangaroo rats had begun their breeding season, even though there wasn't a single kangaroo rat to be seen. (“He could see the impact of their scrotal sacs in the sand,” wrote his close friend Alden Miller, the son of the field biologist Loye Miller. “He was soon proved right by the yield of the traplines.”) Grinnell grew up to be the editor of a leading ornithological journal, the director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley, the creator of a famously precise set of rules for scientific note-taking in the field, and the author of landmark studies of everything from grizzly bears to ecological niche theories. For most of his career he was the grand pooh-bah of natural-history studies west of the Missouri.

Yet despite his early interest in the condor, he was quiet on the
subject. One explanation is that early on, Grinnell didn't think the birds were as close to extinction as the failed collectors kept saying; he knew ranchers who said they still saw condors by the dozens.

But here's a theory I like better than that: I think Grinnell worked hard to keep the condors out of the limelight, as a way of keeping them away from people.

Grinnell was among the first to see the condor as a creature of the wilderness and not as an outlaw bird that flew off with live prey. Unfortunately, there were lots of humans who wanted to get close to the bird, in order to admire it or shoot it or steal its eggs or simply chase it around. I think Grinnell tried to solve this problem in the simplest possible way: if people forgot the bird was around, they wouldn't go looking for it.

This approach was a gamble for an obvious reason: until the end of the 1930s, no one had ever spent more than a few days at a time watching condors lead their lives. No one had ever tried to count the number of condors left in the world, or to systematically study the impact of the skin collectors on the condor. Grinnell helped solve that problem when he sent a graduate student up into the Santa Susana Mountains to do just that in 1939. But before we get to that, we need to take a closer look at the damage done by two groups of condor killers.

The first group didn't really kill the birds. Instead, they kept them as pets. References to condors kept on leashes in people's front yards started turning up before the gold rush, and they did not stop turning up until almost a century later. In 1846, a man named William Gamble wrote that he had long been impressed by “the great disposition of the Vulture to become domesticated.” Gamble said he knew of an Andean condor that roamed the streets of a Peruvian city for years:

California's condor owners said their birds could do all that and more. One sad owner wrote that his pet condor was jumping in and out of a child's wagon when it slipped and broke its leg, forcing the owner to shoot it. A condor tied to a leash tied to something else was killed by a dog. A bird that was supposed to be kept as a pet died when it was fatally injured by a lasso. Condors kept as pets and then returned to the wild would have had a hard time surviving. No one's ever tried to add it all up, but we do know the pet-taking habit extended well into the twentieth century, when the world's most famous condor pet came into the picture. That was a bird the photographer and naturalist William Finley took from the secret nest near Pasadena, after being led there by his friend and colleague Grinnell. The condor, known as “the General,” was supposed to be the subject of an elaborate photographic documentary, beginning on the day the General hatched from his egg. To take these pictures, Finley dragged an old-fashioned camera up and down the mountain many times. One day, when a parent condor seemed to shun the chick, Finley picked it up and took it home with him to Oregon, where he locked the condor into a long, narrow wire-mesh cage built around the stump of an apple tree. The
General was allowed to roam the yard for a time each afternoon; when Finley was late with meals the bird climbed up the side of the enclosure, sticking his beak through the openings and looking around for his master.
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Finley wrote a series of articles about the General for national magazines. In all of them the bird was described as being “gentler” than any cat or dog. “Why should such a creature be revolting?” he asked. “He was not ugly to me. Behind his rough exterior and his appearance of savageness, this young condor showed a nature that was full of love and gentleness.” Finley wrote that the General was shy in the presence of men and unusually fearful of “strange women, which we thought was due to their manner of dress.”

Finley's bird was a new and different version of the condor: one that was competing with the family dog for the title of man's best friend. You wouldn't want to leave this bird in charge of the kids, but you wouldn't ever think of killing it, especially when it was playfully sticking its beak up your pant legs. “One might think a person could have little attachment for a vulture,” Finley wrote. “[But] there is nothing strange or treacherous in the condor nature. General undoubtedly felt a strong love for society. He liked to be petted and amused. He preferred to be near me rather than alone. His intelligence was surprising at times.”

Finley, like his close friend Grinnell, thought the condor's fate was inextricably linked to the fate of the condor's wild homelands, which turned his efforts to humanize condors into a double-edged sword. When Finley wrote the first of his many odes to the bird he called the General, he honored a fad that pulled condors off the very land he wanted to preserve. None of these birds would ever breed or lay a fertile egg again. Many were killed when their owners got bored or tired of seeing carcasses in the yard. Some were left to be released when they got too big, even though these birds would by then have
been behaviorally crippled. Finley sent the General to the Bronx Zoo when he reached adulthood. For a time he was said to be an extremely popular attraction. Then one day the General choked to death on a rubber band that had found its way into the condor cage. Maybe somebody shot it at the bird, thinking it would be funny.

Finley reacted, at least in print, as if he'd lost a son, writing a florid eulogy to the bird whose “wrinkled pate and flabby jowls, with the toothless expression of a toothless old woman, led the imagination back to some mysterious creature of the prehistoric past.” Apparently, he didn't regret the decision to make this bird his pet and saw no link between the work of bird collectors, like him, and the desperate straits the wild condor now appeared to be in.

 

Sanford R. Wilbur, an archivist and biologist who worked with California condors in the 1970s, once tried to find the skins of every condor killed in the name of science. Wilbur says he started out by sifting through the records kept by first-rate collectors such as the late Joseph Grinnell. References he found in those records led him to a lot of libraries, where he sifted through more records and read lots of microfiche. References to kills turned up in hundred-year-old journals and obscure scientific publications. After weeding out some of the tallest tales, he started looking for cross-references. When he was done, he had a documented record of three hundred condors known to have died between 1782 and 1976, and a list of forty different condor eggs taken from their nests by collectors. Eighteen of the deaths were the result of natural causes such as disease. Another thirty-five had no known cause at all, which means collectors might have been involved. The remaining 247 condor deaths were the direct result of human intervention, including forty-one malicious shootings, 177 shootings by museum collec
tors, three deliberate poisonings, and twenty-six other human-caused deaths.

Finally Wilbur went to see most of these condor eggs and skins. He ended up in the basements and back rooms of homes and museums, pulling open drawers that didn't look like they'd been opened for decades. “Many of the skins I saw were pretty ratty-looking,” he said. Specimens of condors on display at the museums were sometimes painted to obscure their age.

Wilbur says he also found a total of seventy hollowed-out condor eggs, including one that turned up in the trash behind a museum. Wilbur thinks the skin collectors helped bring the condor down by doing most of their collecting all at once, at the turn of the last century. The skin collectors themselves would have bristled at this claim, he says. They would have blamed the people who took the condors' eggs.

I
have a picture of an egg collector on my desk—a black-and-white shot of a grizzled old farmhand known as Kelly Truesdale. He's sitting in the corner of a dim shack in an unknown location, wearing a dirty work shirt and pair of dirty jeans. His stone-faced expression reminds me of Buster Keaton. He knows what the joke is, but he'll never admit it.
¹

A flat wooden tray full of birds' eggs rests in Kelly Truesdale's lap. Trays just like it are stacked up in a cabinet behind him. I don't see the condor eggs Truesdale was so good at finding, but that's not surprising: Truesdale would have sold them to the highest bidder before they were even laid.
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This picture was taken in the 1950s, when Truesdale was a bent old codger and egg collecting was a badly tarnished occupation. But it was not always thus. From the end of the Civil War to the start of World War II, egg collecting was a mass obsession in the United States, a hobby in the sense that heroin is an analgesic. In
A World of Watchers: An Informal History of the American Passion for Birds,
the historian Joseph Kastner called this craze a side effect of the rise of the leisure class and of the American magazine, but col
lectors always said the egg came first. They wrote of farm boys “seduced from the furrow” by Mother Nature's “painted oval souvenirs,” and of grown collectors with a language all their own:

The giant pale bluish-green egg of the condor was the ne plus ultra of the collector's world. Men whose collections numbered in the tens of thousands dreamed of laying their hands on one, and most were ready to pay top dollar. Egg collectors living in the condor's rangelands learned to cover their tracks and keep their mouths shut. It was always wise to act as if competitors were lining up to stab you in the back.

Those things happened from time to time: condor-egg collecting was a discipline that had a shady side. A hometown friend of Truesdale's, who understood why he chased the condors' eggs, once wrote about how some of Truesdale's competitors appeared to swim in the “intrigue that seems to characterize oological activities.” In his book
Man and the California Condor,
a local rancher named Ian McMillan said Truesdale learned that the hard way, when he agreed to take a friend to a cave that had an egg inside it. When the men arrived, they decided to take some pictures of the scene, but they hadn't thought to bring a camera. Truesdale knew
there was a camera store in the town of Paso Robles, which he could reach in two days. Leaving his friend to guard the camp and the egg, Truesdale hiked down out of the mountains and caught a passing stagecoach. Five days later, back at the camp, Truesdale discovered that his friend had packed his things and left, taking with him the cotton-filled coffee can in which Truesdale stored his eggs. Climbing to the nest, he saw scattered wisps of cotton and not much else: the egg he'd he planned to steal from the birds had been stolen by his (former) friend. “With no one in sight he shouted,” wrote McMillan. “But there was only silence from the surrounding chaparral.”

Truesdale met his share of rotten luck, said McMillan, who wrote that the collector once flushed an adult condor from a cave before seeing that the egg was sitting on the bird's stubby feet. When the condor jumped, the egg flew forward past the man, exiting the cave and rolling off the edge of a cliff.

Scenes such as those were very rare and very hard to verify, according to the archivists and ornithologists who dig around in egg collectors' records. One of the reasons is that it's all but impossible to find a condor's cave, let alone one with an egg inside. Once, while I was in Arizona, a biologist pointed toward what she said was an active condor nest—a cave in the middle of a wall of red rock. After staring at the spot for five or ten minutes, I decided she was joking. But just as I was giving up, an adult condor slid out of a crack onto a narrow ledge, like paper coming out of a printer. When it slid back in, I still had trouble seeing where the bird had come from.

Even if you were to spy a pair of condors sitting on a ledge with a sign that said
THE EGG IS OVER HERE
, getting to the egg was a job best left to locals with a death wish. These caves were impossible to reach, and the birds were good at making sure they weren't fol
lowed. “No one ever found a condor egg on purpose,” said Lloyd Kiff of the Peregrine Fund. “You had to be good and then had to get lucky.”

Writers for egg-collecting magazines couldn't make much of a struggle pitting humans against condor eggs. Many tried to compensate by playing up the obstacles that stood between the hunters and their prizes—“terrible precipices in whose sides the nest caves of the great vultures were hidden.”

Kelly Truesdale starred in some of the best of this pulp nonfiction. In 1911, he invited William H. Dawson, a prominent ornithologist and avid egg collector, to join him for a trip into the coastal mountains in San Luis Obispo County. The goal was a cave that had once given Truesdale an irreplaceable prize: a condor egg that was a ghostly shade of white and not pale blue. Truesdale had arranged to sell the egg to a collector in the East for what would have been a record price, but the deal fell through when a middleman declared the egg a fake. Truesdale protested mightily, knowing that the charge could wreck his reputation. When the middleman refused to back down, Truesdale went to plan B.
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That was William Dawson, who agreed to follow Truesdale to the same cave to obtain a second egg, which with any luck would be the same shade of white.

Dawson, who wrote about the expedition in
The Birds of California
(South Mouton Co., 1923), promised not to bore his readers with “the arduous details of that climb, and of our sufferings, poked, prodded, buffeted and gouged, as we made our way upward through the all but impenetrable thicket of buckthorn,” and then up a “half-cylinder shaped rock wall…stately and frowning not only, but full of rifts and caves, soft places in the sandstone, scored out by the elements, or once occupied by a softer substance now decayed and leaked out.”

The condors saw the two men coming long before the men saw them. When Dawson noticed the great bird “soaring over the heights of his ancestral castle,” the bird “is already looking down: soon [he] settles in at the top of a pine tree where we can study him with binoculars and telescope. We have a pretty good idea that his optical apparatus is better than ours at that, for he is ill at ease and presently casts off.”

The men kept climbing, pausing when a second condor floated their way, and then a third. The birds circled slowly, then one of them turned and zoomed straight into a cliff. Truesdale and Dawson pointed the binoculars toward what they thought would be the mouth of a cave, but the cave didn't seem to be there. Both men had seen the bird clearly enough to know that it was up there somewhere, but all they saw was a jagged rock wall.

They kept looking. A long time passed. “Finally, Kelly caught a flash of color at the mouth of an obscure hole up the cliff-side. He called me over and I confirmed it—the head of a condor thrust anxiously forth from the mouth of the hole, and then withdrawn—a hole so small that I should not have looked for a falcon in it.”

Dawson wrote that Truesdale flushed the condor from the hole by emitting a “current of catcalls,” which sounds like a funny thing to do. Maybe he dared them to come out and fight like birds. Maybe he just yelled that he was back.

Truesdale was neither the most prolific condor collector nor the most eccentric. Lloyd Kiff of the Peregrine Fund says that honor goes to a climber named George Harris and his brother Jim, who may have taken thirteen condor eggs from three extremely isolated nest caves between 1889 and 1905. The Harrises worked for an egg dealer and collector named H. R. Taylor, the editor of a widely read bird-egg magazine called
The Nidiologist
. When the brothers brought him condor eggs, he'd let his readers know, in the hopes
that one of them would offer him a huge amount of money. Kiff says $500 was the highest price ever paid for a condor egg. Rumors of higher fees have never been confirmed, and Kiff doesn't think they were received.

The Harrises did some stupid things to reach the caves that sometimes had those condor eggs inside them. Often they did little more than tie a single rope around a boulder at the top of a cliff. Then, without attaching safety ropes or harnesses, they'd grab the rope and scramble several hundred feet straight down.

Condor-egg collectors were eccentric people, Kiff explained. One collector lived in a cave he'd dug in the side of a cliff; another wrote that he had almost reached an egg when the cave he was in collapsed, sparing the man but crushing the prize. Yet another collector reached the entrance to a cave by tying one end of a rope around his waist and looping the middle around the base of a manzanita bush: the far end of the rope had been tied to a rock down at the bottom of a cliff that appeared to weigh as much as the collector. When this man stepped off the cliff, the rock rose slowly as he floated down to the mouth of the cave. When he had the egg, he stepped outside the cave, into the air—and more or less floated back up.

Truesdale did turn out to be the best-known member of this group. Ian McMillan and his brother, Eben, saw to that. Both rode shotgun on a few of Truesdale's early egg trips, soaking up everything the older man cared to tell them about the condor and its range. “We were studying the principles and the workings of ecology,” Ian McMillan wrote in his
Man and the California Condor
. “[This was] long before the new science was heard of in the condor country.”

 

I never met Ian McMillan—“Ike” McMillan to his friends—but I did meet his brother, Eben, one fine spring day in the 1990s. I was working on a condor story for National Public Radio. I'd just read about Kelly Truesdale in big brother Ian's book.

“Why don't you come over for some lunch,” Eben said when he heard I was in the area. “Take the road you're on right now until you see the tree with the big metal sculpture next to it—that's the tree James Dean ran into on the night he died, you know. Anyway, when you pass the tree, turn right and just keep driving. The ranch house is down the road.”

We talked for at least two hours on his shady front porch. Actually,
he
talked, but that was fine with me. Eben McMillan was a folk hero at that point in his life—reporters and environmentalists dropped in all the time—but when I was there he didn't want to talk much about himself. What he did instead was talk a lot about Truesdale.

“Truesdale and Dawson didn't make it to the cave in time to get another one of those white eggs,” he said. “The chick had already hatched. But Kelly took the eggshell pieces back with him, and they were just as white as the first egg. Kelly ended up selling that first egg for something like two hundred and fifty dollars, which was the highest price ever paid for a condor egg. You could buy a nice used Model T with that kind of money. Kelly wasn't near as dumb as he looked,” McMillan added at the end. “He knew the land just about as well as the condors did. He understood how it fit together.”

 

The egg-collecting boom went bust after World War I: young collectors no longer rushed the nests en masse in the spring, and the experienced ones started getting old. Rich enthusiasts hunted for condor eggs at estate sales; some purchased whole collections. Laws
that made collecting rare eggs a crime had begun to proliferate, and the scientific skin collectors had abandoned their old allies.

Condor-egg collectors were among the lowest of the low in the minds of sentimental bird lovers. Egg thieves who did it for the money would have been the lowest of them all. “The taking of eggs for the purpose of selling them for a few paltry dollars [is] an outrage,” wrote photographer William Finley. In his view, the most outrageous of the egg thefts were “perpetrated under the guise of collecting for scientific purposes.”

Many of the condor eggs were either lost after that or treated with a weird respect. One collector is said to have carried his egg in parades. One missing condor egg was found inside an otherwise empty Quaker Oats box. Another was hidden for years under a sink. One ended up in the attic of a Texas tire store; its owners said it was worth at least $10,000.

Ian McMillan didn't think the aging egg collectors deserved the grief they were getting. It was the men with guns who were the real problem, he insisted. “Prowess with a gun was a mark of high distinction,” wrote McMillan. “In this philosophy there was no concern for destruction or depletion…. The more uncommon and rare the target, the more quick and eager was the shooting.”

 

Condors looking down on California in the 1920s may have wondered what was going on. Big metal birds that made an endless roar flew back and forth across the mountains. Long metal animals that belched black smoke rolled back and forth on gleaming trails. Former feeding grounds had been replaced by endless lines of fruit trees.

The first recorded fight between a condor and a car took place in the 1920s. The bird was devouring a carcass on the Tejon Ranch
when a rancher decided to chase it in his jet-black Model T. As the car approached, the condor tried to turn and fly away, but it had just eaten and couldn't get off the ground. The Model T followed when the bird scrambled off, futilely running and hopping and flapping its wings in an attempt to build speed. When the car got closer, the bird threw up the meal it had just eaten. When the condor slowed down, the car swerved past it, turned around, and headed straight for the bird. Just as it was about to hit the condor, the Model T stopped and a door flew open. The man who got out happened to be, in addition to the ranch foreman, a former ostrich wrestler. When the condor tried to run away again, the man lassoed it and tied it to the back of the car: