Condor (14 page)

Sibley did try to settle his differences with Ian McMillan once.
“Jon Borneman [of Audubon] and I asked Ian if he wanted to have lunch,” Sibley said. “He kindly invited us to lunch at his ranch.”

When Sibley and Borneman arrived, McMillan showed the men around, talking about his work with California quail. Sibley was encouraged to inspect one of the roosting platforms McMillan built to protect the quail from night predation, which was a big problem then. Sibley remembers being impressed by both the platforms and by the graciousness of his host.

But the tone of the meeting changed dramatically when the steaks were served and the conversation turned to condors. Sibley said McMillan and his wife started yelling almost immediately, accusing their guests of sneaking into occupied nests and handling the condors. Sibley and Borneman denied the charge, but the McMillans did not believe them: “You're entering the nests! Admit it!” is what Sibley remembers. Not knowing what to say except, “No, we didn't,” Sibley and Borneman ate and listened, thanking their hosts and saying good-bye when they were done.

“Ian's real shortcoming was that he could never discuss anything,” Sibley said later. “He would just attack from second one—he didn't want to hear anything.”

“It was like we were saving two completely different birds,” said Borneman. “One was a fragile giant that threw up and flew away when it saw people; the other was a rugged, stubborn coot that would never
abandon
its young.”

Sibley worked with that second condor. He said he had no time to worry about what the hands-off faction thought of his work. This was true in part because Sibley was almost always on the road, and in this case the word “road” is liberally defined. In the early 1960s, most of the roads that ran through condor country were narrow ruts at best: while hiking and climbing more than 850 miles in his first year on the job, he wore out three pairs of boots and
broke two backpacks. “Fred was one of those people who does a day's work in about two hours,” said Borneman. “He was just a persevering, dogged kind of guy.”

Naturally, the condors seemed to watch his every move, according to Sibley's field notes. “In most instances the condor has soared low along a ridge and craned its neck to look at me as it went past,” he wrote. “At other times the birds were seen circling once or twice [above me], or hanging motionless in the air to take a longer look.”

Sibley didn't think he bothered the birds by hiking through their range. But the planes he saw while walking seemed to bother them a lot. Roughly a hundred planes and gliders flew across the Sespe on a typical day in the middle of the 1960s. Sibley said the condors would ignore an aircraft coming up from below, but would “react rather violently to one coming from above,” twisting and turning like they do when attacked by golden eagles.

Once he watched a condor shoot forward out of a cave after hearing a sonic boom, but not to flee the area: skidding to a halt at the lip of a cliff, the bird started looking around for the source of the boom, watching planes fly overhead for hours. He saw other condors react in similar ways to gunshots, dynamite blasts, and passing trucks. Certainly, these birds were bothered by such intrusions, but Sibley wrote that he also saw a lot of resilience. These were birds that badly needed protection, Sibley wrote, but they weren't reclusive giants that would leave an egg behind to die.

These condors seemed much tougher than the condors Koford wrote about. That thought was enough to infuriate Koford and his allies, some of whom began describing Sibley as a tool of the prodam forces. This was false, to say the least, but Sibley didn't fight the charge in public—even in the wake of the lunch fiasco, he kept looking for a chance to reconcile quietly.

Those hopes vanished for good in the summer of 1967, when
Sibley took an ailing condor to the Los Angeles Zoo for treatment. Ian McMillan immediately accused him of fabricating the bird's illness, and implied that the bird had been captured as part of a plot to circumvent the trapping ban. This was a claim that would never be dismissed, even though it was not true. Everyone who saw the bird in question knew it needed help, and at one point even Koford agreed that it needed to be taken to the zoo.

“It would have died otherwise,” said Borneman, who helped capture the bird. “It was next to death when we caught it.” Borneman added that the fledgling had been staggering around near a barn for several days when a fisherman called to report that it was refusing food and acting like it could no longer fly.

The next day, Sibley led a group of forest rangers and biologists up into the chaparral.
This won't take long
, he remembers thinking to himself. By the end of the day, the fledgling bird would either be dead from its ailments or recovering in the wild, full of medicine administered during a brief encounter with the veterinary experts at the zoo in Griffith Park. It would happen nice and easy, he thought.

But of course it did not. This was a condor that would soon be known for its habit of flying head-on into the chests of terrified zookeepers and visitors, sometimes knocking them onto their backs and standing on top of them; it also tried to breed with metal fences and tree stumps. To this day the bird in question holds the unofficial record for flesh chunks ripped from the arms, legs, and torsos of humans. It may have been the least approachable and in that sense “wildest” condor ever trapped.

Later they would name it Topa Topa and marvel at how tough it was. For two days, half-dead, the bird stayed just ahead of the scrambling trappers, often flying just enough to get to the center of a nasty stretch of chaparral, where it would collapse from exhaus
tion. When the men got close enough, the bird would rouse himself again and lurch forward into another nasty mass of thorny branches.

These dance steps were repeated for at least a day before Sibley noticed all the poison oak. He ignored the rashes and kept hacking through the brush, but others weren't so lucky: one biologist was rushed off to the closest hospital when his whole body seemed to start swelling. All of the trappers were raw and bleeding at the end of the second day, when the fledgling finally got too tired to move.

“We just rushed it and tackled it,” Sibley said. “Stuffed it into a large duffel bag and took the struggling package down the road. One car stopped and asked what we had in the bag; Borneman yelled out ‘ant lion' and the fellow drove off happy.”

At that point it was too late to drive down to L.A., so Sibley took the condor to his house in Ojai and locked it in the garage. Before setting out on the trapping trip, he'd bought a huge mound of hamburger meat, just in case. But when the time came to feed the bird, he didn't know what to do. Should he scatter bits and pieces near the bird? Should he just drop the mound of meat and run?

Sibley said those questions resolved themselves as soon as he opened the cellophane wrapping on his emergency supply of hamburger. “The bird immediately struck at me,” he recalled. “The neck pulled the head back and then whipped it forward, as a snake might strike. The bill hit the package, knocking it to the ground and before I could bend down to retrieve it [the condor] had consumed almost the entire package. In the next minute every scrap had been retrieved and consumed. What surprised me was the instantaneous recognition of the package as food. I'm sure the initial strike was hostile, but once the bill hit the food the whole scene reversed and it was a one-bird feeding frenzy.”

The future Topa Topa was taken to the zoo, found to have noth
ing obviously wrong with it, and returned to the wild. To make sure it would eat something other than packaged meat, Sibley and some colleagues put a jess on one of the bird's legs and drove a stake at the other end of a long rope into the frozen ground. A deer carcass was placed nearby, so the condor could eat and still retreat.

Sibley began to relax, but that didn't last very long at all, because the condor wouldn't eat. Days went by while Sibley and his colleagues sat in the snow and watched Topa Topa sit and stare at the carcasses it was supposed to rip apart, failing to move when other birds moved in to eat. Sibley took a day off and went home at one point, only to receive a frantic phone call. The tethered bird had flown down to the carcass to start eating when two other condors flew down to join the fun. One of the new condors pushed the other one into a patch of melting snow, Sibley said; that bird turned on the tethered Topa Topa and “beat the shit out of it”:

Sibley knew the condor was young because its head and under-wing feathers were still black, but past that he knew nothing. He didn't know where the condor lived or who its parents were. He didn't know how old it was, or why it looked like such a zombie or whether anyone would ever see it again.

More frantic searching followed. More biologists joined the chase. For several days they again scoured the rugged countryside,
looking for a bird that hardly anyone expected to find alive. Sibley finally found it when he smelled something awful emanating from under a big bush. Crawling underneath the bush he saw Topa Topa hanging upside down like a giant roast chicken in the window of a deli, its leg still fastened to the tether. The stake at the other end of the tether was caught in the branches of the bushes. Sibley climbed up and pulled it out, recalling that the condor “thanked me for finding him by taking a very painful chunk of flesh out of my arm.”

Topa Topa lay on its side in a cage in the front seat of Sibley's pickup truck as he drove it down to the zoo. The tethered leg was clearly injured, but Sibley didn't know how badly. When he reached the zoo, he gingerly set the bird down in front of a bowl of food. Almost immediately, Sibley said, Topa Topa “stood up on its tiptoes and stretched like it was ten feet tall, walked across the floor, and gobbled up the food. The collective sigh of relief was amazing.”

Topa Topa hasn't seen the wild since. He's been at the Los Angeles Zoo for thirty-seven years now, and there have been few dull moments. Attempts to put Topa Topa in a cage with other vultures failed when he bit the wattles off their necks; he also bit the lips of a llama in an adjoining cage. Topa Topa often flew across his pen and slammed his feet into the chests of human visitors, knocking them through open doors or onto their backsides. And whenever keepers tried to examine him he tried to eat their clothes. “Shoelaces were ripped loose and shoes were torn apart,” wrote bird keeper Frank Todd in one of a series of reports he prepared for the zoo. “There was usually nothing left of the socks above the tops of the shoes, and on one occasion Sibley's pants were ripped open from pocket to cuff.” When Topa Topa was moved to a cage with an artificial cliff, he proceeded to destroy it. When other ani
mals were housed with him, he refused to let them eat. Keepers started refusing to even enter Topa Topa's cage for fear that he would hurt them.
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“If you didn't like having little pieces ripped out of you, he wasn't a good bird to be around,” Todd said. “Especially if you showed the tiniest hint of fear. What you had to do was hold your ground and maybe even charge back at him. Then he respected you.”

Topa Topa seemed to enjoy biting the hands that fed him. Todd said he remembers one biting incident above all the others. It took place in the early 1970s, when the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of endangered species stamps, one of which featured a picture of a condor in flight. “The Postal Service called us up to say they'd like to take a promotional picture of Topa Topa and his keeper standing next to the Postmaster General, and we said ‘sure,'” he recalled. “So they came into the cage and I had my arm around old Topa and we're all ready to get it over with. As the photographer is ready to shoot, Topa sticks his beak up into my sleeve like he wants to play around. Then I felt him bite a big chunk out of my arm. Nobody else saw him do it, that's how fast it was. I sat there waiting to get my picture taken with all this blood gushing down my arm.”

Todd said some of Topa Topa's other habits were much more endearing. When it rained, the bird raced back and forth across its pen trying to catch individual raindrops. Topa Topa also had a dance he only did when he wanted Todd in his pen. “It consisted of running about on the ground, flapping the wings, jumping into the air some three feet or more while rotating one hundred and eighty degrees, and then either running over to the door or jumping up and down from its perch.”

There was one thing Topa Topa didn't do that caught Todd's at
tention: he never made any of the noises that most condors make all the time. Condors don't have voice boxes, but they can hiss like dragons if you get too close to them. Todd thought Topa Topa could have made these noises, too, but for unknown reasons he did not. “The only sounds I have ever heard from him were when he was a year or so old,” Todd wrote, “and that was merely the passing of gas.”

 

The Sespe Creek project skidded off the tracks in the summer of 1967, when the citizens of Ventura County voted not to fund it. The tax referendum that would have raised the money for construction only lost by thirty-six votes, but the hands-off forces were thrilled by what they saw as a trend-setting victory. “The conservation philosophy out of which the Sespe sanctuary had materialized was spreading like a leaven through our society,” Ian McMillan wrote.
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McMillan and his allies failed to thank Fred Sibley for helping to nail this coffin shut. Since 1965, Sibley had been quietly demolishing the arguments used to support it, including the offbeat notion that a massive building project would improve the condor's life. “The Sespe Creek project can only be judged as being unacceptably detrimental to the condor's survival,” he wrote at the end of a federal report on the impact the project would have had on the future of the giant birds. “The extinction of the condor would be an almost certain consequence.”
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