Condor (5 page)

“Humans are the only real problem these birds have ever had,” he told me. “And that's important. People who think the condor is declining naturally might find it easier to just let the birds go. ‘Death with dignity'—isn't that the phrase? I think that's ridiculous. If this species really does have one wing in the grave, it's because we jammed it down there.”

It's a wonder they're still with us, I said. By the way, why
is
that? How did condors manage to survive the change that killed the other giant birds?

Go to California, Emslie said. So I did.

 

October 19, 2001—10:47
A
.
M
.: I am stuck in off-peak traffic on the Golden State Freeway near an outlet mall disguised as an Egyptian temple. As a native of this area, I think this is wrong: those walls were supposed to hide a tire factory.

Sitting in my rental car, I think about a scientist I interviewed once, ten or fifteen years ago. His name was John Heyning, and when we met, he drove a modified flatbed truck he called the whalemobile. When dead whales washed up on the region's beaches, Heyning cleared away the crowds and hauled the carcasses off to a warehouse in east Los Angeles. He used to joke that this was the only city on Earth where you could drive a truck with a whale on the back of it and not have anybody notice. He used to say he wanted to pull into a McDonald's and ask for a bun.

And here's the funny part: if a California condor were to soar above the city of Los Angeles today, a dead cetacean on the back of a truck might be the
only
thing it recognized. Whales are probably the things that saved these birds when the era of the supersize her
bivores ended. Carcasses the size of mastodons washed up on the beaches all the time back then. They may have been all the condors needed.

“It can't be proved,” said Heyning when I called him on my cell phone. “But, I think it may be true.” Ten thousand years ago, there were a lot of right whales swimming close to the Pacific Coast, and a lot of gray whales as well. Fur seals, harbor seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals were abundant, and there were many more sharks.

“Condors couldn't have gotten through the hides of the whale on their own,” he continued. “On the other hand, they wouldn't have had to.” Short-faced bears and eagles would have raced the condors to the beach when the carcass of a whale washed up, ripping holes so big that the careless might have slipped and disappeared into the mounds of blubber. After the Pleistocene, grizzly bears came down in the night to make those openings.

Centuries after that, Los Angeles is doing its best to make it look as if none of these events could have happened. This is a city always pretending to be something other than what it used to be. From the Pacific to the mountains, every bit of the landscape has been terraformed or paved and repaved. The rich, slow river that used to wander down through the center of the L.A. Basin has been straightened and lined with concrete. Flora and fauna were long ago replaced by gangs and movie crews.

The traffic breaks. Not long afterward, I pull into a parking lot of the George C. Page Museum, home of the largest and most spectacular collection of Pleistocene fossils in the world. These bones were pulled from asphalt sumps like Pit 91, just a few steps outside the back door.

The secrets these sumps held were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, when local cattlemen pulled what they thought
were some very large cow bones out of one of them: bones with fifteen-foot-long curling tusks, or giant fangs.

This is where Steve Emslie's professional hero made his intellectual fortune. In the early 1900s, Miller wrote what's still the most eloquent ode to the workings of the tar pits. It starts when a falcon swoops down at a mouse trapped by the sump: “Let the wingtip or a gasping talon break that deceptive surface,” Miller wrote, “and the hunter is caught and sooner or later sinks with his quarry. The mouse is no more surely held than the mastodon or the ground sloth. The falcon is no more strongly attached than the sabertooth or the great American lion. Eventually there spread far downwind an odor that was attractive to [another species of bird]; he would swing hypnotically into the wind and to his own undoing.”

I walk into the George C. Page Museum to see the skeletons in the glass cabinets: giant eagles, giant storks, and giant vultures. All but the condor have been gone for thousands of years, and at times the condor has seemed ready to follow. Few seem more convinced that it would happen soon than the great Loye Miller, who argued that the principal threat to condors was the passage of time.

“Is not the California condor a senile species that is far past its prime? It was widely distributed and numerically abundant in Pleistocene times (in Florida, Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, California) but is now restricted to one or two localities and a numerable population of individuals within the Californias. Is not the condor a species with one foot and even one wing in the grave?”
²

Those words have been called a noose around the condor's neck, and in a way it's true. This is not a species that's grown old and feeble—that's scientific mumbo jumbo—but it is a creature that evolved to fit a world that's disappeared. The condor is a relic of the Pleistocene epoch, not quite suited to the present day and age.

But does this mean we ought to let the condor fade away? Hell no. I think it means we should do everything possible to keep the condor around. If you see one soaring, think of saber-toothed cats and giant mastodons. Then ask yourself this: “How much would I pay to get some of those animals back?”

C
ondors were a thousand times more important to the Indians than they are to you or me. This fact is underlined when anthropologists find the bones of condors in the graves of Indians, and when kids dig up ancient headdresses made of condor feathers out of the corners of caves. In California's San Rafael Mountains, there's
an Indian painting of condors on the wall of a particular cave—when the sun rises on the day of the winter solstice every year, the first light that enters the cave lands just below that figure of the bird.

Condors also play a crucial role in the stories told by tribal elders. But the roles they play vary wildly as you move across the state. Surviving members of the Wiyot tribe in Humboldt County, California, say it was the condor that created the present version of the human race, for example. They say Condor and his sister took the job when Above Old Man decided he didn't like the people
he'd
created, and then resolved to kill them with a flood.
¹

This flooding of the world was supposed to be a secret, but Condor managed to find out. According to the Wiyot storytellers, Condor and his sister prepared for the flood by weaving a large, deep covered basket. When the water rose, they got into the basket and sealed it up tight. When the basket stopped rocking and floating around, they opened it and got out. Condor's sister became his wife, and when they bred, there were no eggs. Well-spoken, furless human babies were born instead, and Above Old Man was pleased.

A white ethnographer recorded that story after speaking with the remnants of the Wiyot tribe, which was all but erased on February 26, 1860. That's the day three groups of Yankee settlers armed with hatchets, guns, and knives attacked three different Wiyot settlements, killing whole Wiyot families as they slept. Shortly after that awful day, the U.S. Army herded the remaining Wiyot people through the gates of Fort Humboldt for their own protection.

Members of the Wiyot tribe hold candlelight vigils every year on February 26. Stories about condors that survive catastrophes must have a special resonance to them.

But Condor is also a destroyer of worlds, according to parts of the Mono tribe of Madera County, California. Their tale told that the Condor known to the Mono had a habit of scooping up people
and carrying them back to a spring, where Condor would cut off their heads and drain their blood into the water. When the spring was full of blood, Condor always dug a ditch that led straight to Ground Squirrel's house, which he always hoped to flood. Several ground squirrels would then try to flee, but Condor would catch them and fly them to the spring, where he would put them down and pause to take a drink of bloody water. While Condor is drinking, his daughter urges one of the ground squirrels to cut off her father's head, which the ground squirrel manages to do. But when Condor's head comes off, the bloody water he's been drinking “runs forth in every direction,” drowning the entire world.

Yet another kind of condor—call it version 3.0—tried to exterminate the human race but got his comeuppance in the end. Members of the Gashowu Yokuts tribe of south-central California said Condor was not only the love child of Coyote and Hawk, but was also a human gambler who shot an arrow at Owl, a powerful magician. Owl responded by causing big black feathers to sprout out of the body of the gambling man, who eventually turned into Condor and flew away. Condor, the former gambler, lived above the Earth, but sometimes he flew down to eat people. Then one day he flew home with three live children, two boys and a girl. At first he told his mother he intended to keep the children as his pets, but then he seemed to change his mind, telling his mother to fatten up the children so that he could eat them for dinner.

Condor's mother started to worry then: When Condor was done eating all the humans, would she herself be the next meal? She decided to get rid of her son and told the children to shoot arrows at him. They did, for half a day, yet Condor didn't even notice. So Mother cut a hole in her son and they all climbed inside. That time, he felt something. Condor flew up and then crashed and died, and his mother and the children burned him. But his eyes burst out of
his head and were lost in the brush. Had they been able to find those eyes and burn them in the fire, there would be no condors in the world.

Of all the animals in all the stories told by California's native tribes, only the condor follows such varied story lines. Coyotes were almost always tricksters, for example; grizzly bears, once or future people. But when a giant vulture flies into the stories, you never know what's going to happen.

Another example of the mythological condor's many-splendorness comes from one of the many Yokut villages scattered through what's known as the San Joaquin Valley. This Condor not only tried to kidnap Prairie Falcon's wife but also tried to steal the job of chief from Eagle.

Storytellers from the Chumash tribe of Southern California said the condor started out as an all-white bird that turned black when it flew too close to a fire. Meanwhile, the condor of the Northfork Meno was picking up sleeping people and taking them to a “sky-land,” never to return. The wings of the Yokut condor caused eclipses, and sometimes he ate the moon.

This is why the condor is the perfect symbol for the state's divergent Native American tribes. Roughly thirty languages diverged here into more than 130 dialects, so that in most parts of California all you had to do to reach a different language group was walk fifty-one miles. Communities that held more than five hundred people were considered exceptional. Communities of more than a thousand Indians were almost unheard of. Where there was game, these Native Americans hunted; where there were fish, they fished. When wild meat was scarce, they preserved their food, smoking and storing it in big communal warehouses. Loosely affiliated Native Americans rooted themselves in hundreds of “microclimates,” usually finding peaceful ways to make the best use of them; in 1769, when
Father Junipero Serra toured the state, three hundred thousand Indians were living there in relative harmony. They built no pyramids, formed no empires, and never had tribal councils. They never worshipped Tlaloc or Quetzalcoatl. They failed to invent the wheel.

Instead, they thrived in ways that tended to preserve the richness of the various worlds they occupied. The Native American tribes did burn off the forests, and they sometimes overfished and overhunted. But they didn't do it anywhere near as often as the white settlers did, and by most accounts the damage was not lasting. It's possible that over several thousand years, only one species was put in jeopardy by the California Indians: that was the California condor.

Death by veneration was a common fate in the era of the Native Americans. There was no doubt the word “death” had a different meaning for them. Most of the state's Indian tribes thought the world consisted of three levels, with the spirit world on top and the physical Earth in the middle. Below the Earth lived powerful and typically malevolent creatures that came out at night. And to the Indians,
all
three of these worlds were real. Animals were always moving back and forth among them, as were special people called shamans, who knew how to borrow powers from the animals, making it possible to travel to the upper and lower worlds.

Borrowing usually meant killing the condor in ritualistic ways, making ceremonial clothing out of its feathers and skin. Shamans danced under sacred wings and feathered capes that sometimes reached the ground. By some accounts, only shamans were allowed to touch these magical items. When particular shamans died, the clothes were said to become cursed.

Shrill-sounding whistles made of condor bones were sometimes played while the shamans danced, strutting slowly and bobbing their heads like the real birds do when they are trying to attract a mate. Many tribes believed that the birds they had killed were
brought back to life by the dances: somewhere in the mountains, presumably, they simply reappeared.

No one will ever know how many condors died this way. But one camp of condor experts thinks that the birds might have
benefited
from the killing rituals and dances. These scholars say there's scattered evidence that some tribes stopped killing when the condors seemed to be disappearing. Some of these same tribes were said to treat local condors as invaluable community property. It's also possible that when the native tribes burned the six-foot grasses off their hunting lands, they may have helped the condors by making it easier for them to find food.

But the authors of a recent book on condors take a much more pessimistic view. Noel Snyder, a well-known biologist who was once codirector of the California Condor Recovery Program, says crude calculations seem to show that the rituals hurt the condor badly. After dividing the number of square miles in the condor's historic range by the number of miles occupied by the average tribe of Indians, Snyder and coauthor Helen Snyder concluded that as many as seven hundred different Indian tribal groups could have occupied the condor's rangelands. If even a tenth of those tribes killed condors on a regular basis, the impact would have been huge. “We believe,” they wrote in 2001, “that earlier use of condors for ritual purposes may have substantially depressed local condor populations, leading to a continuous overall population decline long before the arrival of the Europeans. Prior to such persecution, condors may have been much more abundant than indicated by any of the historical records.”
²

 

In 1986, as the last free-flying condors were being trapped and taken to zoos, a group of people who identified themselves as mem
bers of the Coastal Clan of the Chumash Nation came forward with a list of demands. No one at the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs had ever heard of this clan, but that didn't mean it wasn't real: there had been a time when the Chumash culture dominated large parts of Southern and central California. Ethnographers and Indians agreed that condors were extremely important to the Chumash: when “great chiefs” died, great condors flew them to the Land of the Dead. However, condors needed to be killed to make the journey. This released the condor's supernatural powers, allowing it to fly great distances in small amounts of time.

But this was not the condor known to the self-declared members of the Coastal Chumash Clan; theirs was a bird whose demise in the wild would kill the Chumash culture. The leader of the Coastal Clan, a man named John Sespe, demanded that the trapping cease. When it did not, he warned that great disasters would befall them all.

Not long afterward, an angry group of twenty activists and Indians gathered near the Ventura County office of the California Condor Recovery Program, chanting and disrupting traffic, and handing out flyers that denounced the trapping plan as a violation of religious rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and of Native American rights guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.
³

One such release read as follows:

A lawyer named Sid Flores, speaking for the activists, was meeting with officials all over the state. In Sacramento, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles, Flores asked that the Coastal Chumash be granted a permanent seat on the Condor Recovery Program, be given permission to watch field biologists wait inside the traps, be awarded exemptions from the law that makes it a felony to own a condor feather, and be offered some of the funding in a condor conservation bill that never made it through the state legislature. Flores said his clients did not seek to undo conservation measures that were already in effect, but they did not want to go along with the plan to send the last birds to the zoo. Flores's clients wanted the last three condors taken out of the zoos and released on Santa Catalina Island, a wildlife refuge west of the Ventura coast. Santa Catalina is considered sacred land by many Chumash, including those officially recognized by the federal government. While the Chumash activists Flores spoke for were not members of a recognized clan, the California Native American Heritage Commission seconded their demands.

“When the condors are gone so are the Chumash,” said John Sespe of the Coastal Chumash Clan at a meeting called to calm things down. Sespe then declared that the members of the California Condor Recovery team had committed acts of sacrilege by trapping and handling condors without Chumash overseers on hand. He hinted that his group would go to court to halt the program if they didn't get satisfaction. Furthermore, he added, greater forces were at play here. “Condors control the weather,” he said. “If you take them away the weather will do terrible things, I'm telling you.”

The unofficial Chumash activists would have faced an uphill battle in court, in part because the same laws that protect their religious rights would have required them to prove that their ideas about condors had deep roots. It might not have been enough to
say that a dead uncle had told stories about condors that controlled the weather, or about condors that ceased to exist when they left the wild. Chumash scholars called forth by the government could have argued that there were no hints of stories like these in notes taken by the old ethnographers. Environmental activists from groups such as Earth First!
had
spoken of the condor as a “Thunderbird” with the power to affect the weather, and one or two writers had made the comparison back in the early 1970s. But as far as anyone could tell, there was no Chumash condor with the powers of a Thunderbird. Cynics might have noted that this was the kind of condor you'd invent to stop a trapping program.

But the people who ran the Condor Recovery Program at the time knew they had a potentially catastrophic public-relations situation on their hands. The question wasn't whether the fight could be won, but how to make it go away. Although they hadn't said so publicly, the leaders of the recovery team were appalled by the proposal to move three condors to Santa Catalina Island, mostly because they didn't think the birds would have had a chance in hell of surviving there. Condors aren't built to fly on the winds that swirl over the ocean, and Santa Catalina wasn't big enough to serve as anything other than a glorified outdoor cage. The team members weren't much happier about the proposal to allow a “medicine elder” to perform a special ceremony at the site of every condor capture, as there was always a chance that holding a bird in one-hundred-degree heat for the extra half hour needed to perform the ceremony might seriously injure it. Representatives of these groups were told they couldn't do a special dance at the point of capture, but they were welcome to follow the trapping teams on any federal lands and on private lands if owners gave their permission. Unfortunately, the last of the condors was caught on a ranch whose owners refused to give the Indians permission to go on the land. For
several days the Indians waited in a car near the entrance to the ranch, and when they finally abandoned their post, they handed an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a special ceremonial powder, tasking him to sprinkle it on the bird if it was captured.