Condor (9 page)

But at the end of the nineteenth century there were a lot of naturalists who would have brought the hammer crashing down.

T
he California condor on plate 426 of Audubon's
The Birds of North America
is clearly up to something. The body's out of balance and there's something oddly hunched about the wings. The bird has whipped its head around to look at us through those bulging eyes. It wants to know who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing in its roost tree.

Birds that look alive and self-aware are the reason John James Audubon is still a household name, I think. Stare at almost any of his plates for a couple of minutes and you'll see what I mean. First you'll start to wonder where the bird you're looking at is planning to go when you put the book away; then you'll want to know what it's
thinking
about, and what it thinks about you.

Audubon's ability to capture live birds inside his masterworks is even more impressive when you think about the kinds of birds he
used as his models. All of them were dead, and most had been gutted, skinned, and sewn back together again, with wires and wads of padding instead of bone and muscle, and cotton balls pushing out the eyelids. Mounted birds from good museums featured glass eyes and lifelike poses. But Audubon also used bullet-riddled birds whose wounds were covered by rearranged feathers. Taxidermy was becoming a high art in the 1840s, when Audubon was at work on
The Birds of America.
Trophy hunters, artists, and naturalists mounted birds to study. They were the closest things to photographs available then, and even when photographers began coming around, there was nothing quite so useful as a nicely stuffed bird.

Audubon never saw a living condor soar on the thermal winds, and if he ever saw a live one at all, he never mentioned it. It's likely that the bird he reanimated was in bad shape, even for a carcass: a drab-looking juvenile with a massive head wound, a shattered wing, and a severed spinal cord. The most likely source of this condor was a rising star who'd soon become one of Audubon's bitterest rivals. At the time John Kirk Townsend of Philadelphia collected this bird in his late twenties, he and the artist were the best of friends.

When his short, spectacular career began in the early 1800s, John Kirk Townsend was the very model of a modern natural scientist, which means in part that from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, some of his achievements seem a little profane. Townsend was a deeply religious man who robbed the graves of Indians. He was an upper-crust Philadelphian who traveled through the wilderness with riotous drunks. He was a meticulous scientist and medical doctor who once jammed his head into the sliced-open stomach of a bison carcass to quench a terrible thirst. “I pushed aside the reeking ventricles,” he wrote, “drinking until
forced to breathe.” Townsend may also be the only ornithologist ever to discover a new species while simultaneously wiping it out: that would be the Townsend's bunting, which was apparently found and erased with a single shot in 1835.
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Townsend was a careful correspondent with a good eye for absurdity; he didn't mind describing the ridiculous things he sometimes had to do to get his specimens and to keep them in good shape until they could be hauled back east. He writes of waking up in the morning to find that his guides had drained the jugs of whiskey used as a preservative even though the jugs had lots of small dead birds inside them, floating in the booze.

But in my opinion, the story of how Townsend got his giant vulture is the most gripping story he ever wrote and easily the most sensational true story ever written by a condor collector.

The trip that made the story possible began in 1834, when Townsend and a fellow scientist won a $125 grant that allowed them to join a party of seventy men headed west to the coast of Oregon. Townsend and the famous Harvard botanist Thomas Nuttall spent the next several years collecting plants and animals for the American Philosophical Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. In Townsend's words, “Mr. N and I were up before dawn [every day], strolling through the umbrageous forest, inhaling the fresh air and making the echoes ring with the report of guns.”

In his
Narrative of a Journey Across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River,
Townsend marvels at the things he saw on the trip west: flocks of passenger pigeons that seemed to number in the billions, bison herds that looked as if they could cover the world, and brilliantly colored Carolina parakeets that seemed “entirely unsuspicious” of the dangers posed by passing hunters. But the creature Townsend most wanted to see did not appear to him at first. “The
Great Californian” was the name he used to describe the California condor. “I kept a sharp lookout for this rare and interesting bird in all situations,” he wrote. “But not one did I see” while traveling west to the Pacific.

Townsend and Nuttall began the trip in identical outfits they'd bought together in St. Louis: dark leather trousers, green felt coats, and white wool hats with wide brims. They could not possibly have fit in less with the rest of their traveling party, but that may have been the idea. These were men who got drunk when the sun came up and brawled until well into the night. By comparison, the oddly dressed scientists spent almost every day collecting specimens, and almost every night pressing the plants and skinning the animals. By the end of the trip, they'd filled several wagons full of exotic species that most had never seen before on the East Coast.

There weren't any condors in those wagons when the formal expedition ended. Townsend apparently gave up hope of ever seeing the giant vulture and sailed off to the Sandwich Islands (now known as the Hawaiian Islands), where he stayed until 1837. Then, before returning to Philadelphia, Townsend took a trip up the Willamette River to watch millions of salmon swim back to the shallow waters they'd been born in, then spawn and die, and “there, to my inexpressible joy, soared a California condor, seemingly intent upon watching the motions of his puny relatives below.”

The condor watched the dying salmon leaping up onto the banks of the Willamette River, according to an article Townsend later wrote for the Linnean Society of the Association of Pennsylvania Colleges. Then, shortly after Townsend arrived, he saw the bird shoot down “like an arrow” toward the riverbank below him, landing on the writhing body of a salmon that had just leapt out of the water.

Thrilled to finally see the bird he'd dreamed of in the flesh, Townsend did what any good naturalist would have done in 1837: he raised his rifle and shot it, shattering a wing and bringing the condor down on the far side of the river, where it landed in what appeared to be a lifeless lump. Seeing no signs of movement, Townsend took off all his clothes and swam to the far side of the river, where he “sprang upon the shore and ran with delighted haste to secure the much coveted and valuable specimen.” But the condor was back on its feet by then, looking like it wanted revenge.
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Townsend, now completely nude, chased the condor around for a while. Then he saw Indian families coming out of the woods. “The inhabitants of an Indian village near,” he wrote, “men, women, children, and dogs, startled by the sound of my gun, were flocking out to see what was the matter.” Townsend writes of looking around in vain for a stick with which to hit the giant bird: “None was to be found, and my only weapons were stones, with which I continued, for a considerable time, to pelt the vulture.”

The natives stood behind him, amused. “I heard more than once the loud obstreperous laugh of the women,” Townsend writes, adding that the women seemed to laugh especially loudly “when the Vulture was flapping after me, and I was throwing sand in his eyes with my naked feet.”

Other men—me for instance—would have been less willing to expose their naked bodies to a bird with a razor-sharp beak. But Townsend writes that he chose to stay and keep throwing rocks at the condor even as it “dashed furiously at me, hissing like an angry serpent.” After about an hour, one of those rocks smashed into the condor's head, at least knocking it out. Townsend turned and borrowed a hunting knife from one of the Indians, using it to sever the condor's spinal cord.

No one would have questioned Townsend's need to kill that Cal
ifornia condor, least of all his colleagues in the scientific world. Curators all over Europe and the United States had been yearning to acquire a condor skin since the late 1700s, when the British Museum put the first one to leave America on display. Bird lovers from all over Europe came to see the dead giant from the far side of the world, despite the fact that the beak of the bird was made out of colored wax. (The real beak may have broken off in transit, or been blown off the condor's head by a bullet: no one knows and no one seemed to care.)
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But while many museums and universities made it known that they would pay what it took to get a condor carcass, most of them never got the chance to reach into their wallets. Lewis and Clark shot more than one condor in 1805, but for decades almost everybody else who tried failed even to see the birds. One of the exceptions was David Douglas, a Canadian naturalist who wrote of seeing many condors near Vancouver in 1827. “This magnate of the air was ever hovering around,” he writes. “In flight he is the most majestic bird I have ever seen.” Douglas was also among the first to marvel at the speed with which the condors found fresh carcasses, writing that “only a few minutes after a horse or another large animal gives up the ghost, they may be descried like specks in aether.”

All but one of the condors that were sent overseas left the country as carcasses. The one that didn't sailed out of Monterey in the 1860s in the hold of a merchant ship. It's likely that the bird was kept belowdecks in a big wooden crate, into which the condor would have vomited and shat on a more or less constant basis. The stench would have made it impossible to keep the bird in a passenger's cabin. Someone would have brought the bird meat and water every couple of days, checking to make sure the thing inside the crate was still alive.
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That's an image that sticks with me: a seasick condor in a wooden crate in the darkness of a hold for weeks. What did it do when a door swung open and the light flooded in? What did the man who brought the food think he saw inside the crate? Maybe the condor's beak came out between the slats as the man with the food approached. Maybe he heard a fiery hiss or the flapping of cramped wings.

There are no published records of the trip that took this condor south to Panama, or of the means by which the bird was moved through the wet, green jungles to the western shore of the Caribbean Sea. This is where a second ship took possession of the crated bird, moving it across the Atlantic Ocean and up the River Thames, where it's likely that the crate was placed in the back of a horse-drawn wagon and hauled over crowded cobblestone streets to the London Zoo.

The eyes and the lungs of the condor would have been burning by then, since London's skies were thick with the coal smoke pouring from millions of chimneys.

The condor survived the harrowing trip to the London Zoo. If anything did go wrong, it was not thought to be worth including in the minutes of the London Zoological Society.

The general demand for skins that could be put on display in museums rose sharply in the late 1830s, when taxidermists learned that arsenic powder kept these skins from rotting. The taxidermists who used this powder knew it was dangerous stuff, but many thought the risks could be eliminated by mixing in other powders and applying it with care.

It's my guess that Townsend put a lot of arsenic powder on the wagonloads of carcasses sent back to Philadelphia after the western expedition, and on the condor skin that followed. The condition of that first group of skins delighted John James Audubon, who
bought ninety-three of them. “Such beauties, such rarities,” he told a friend. “And hang me if you do not echo my saying so when you see them!” But Audubon never mentioned Townsend's condor skin, even though he may have used it. By the time it arrived, he was Townsend's enemy, calling the explorer a “lazy” man who'd collected skins of little use.

Townsend had been planning to write a series of his own books about the birds of the United States, with lavish illustrations to be provided by various French artists. But he couldn't compete with Audubon's masterwork. Townsend only published the first book in his planned series before he went broke and junked the project. Townsend's brilliant future began to fade, and he had begun to lose his health. In 1851, after years of sickness, he died. The cause of death by most accounts was arsenic poisoning.

 

Bird collectors hired by museums hunted California's condors on an intermittent basis for most of the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries. What they did more often was complain about how hard it was to find a condor to shoot. Some of these hunters thought the birds were shy and inclined to stay away from people, while others talked about the near-impenetrability of the mountains the condors lived in.

Fears for the future of the species were expressed on a regular basis. Just as regularly, sport hunters or ranchers got the blame. Overzealous private collectors were occasionally added to this list of suspects, along with the “oologists” who bought and sold the condors' eggs.

The only group the scientists did not blame was their own. Suggestions to the contrary were met with indignation at first, and then with explanations of the many things the scientists learned
from bird skins. These explanations were crystallized in a 1915 essay written by Joseph P. Grinnell, one of the most important and accomplished natural scientists in his day. “It is with considerable apprehension that I have observed an unmistakable decrease in the number of collectors,” he wrote. “Matters of precision and accuracy are no doubt suffering as a consequence of this forsaking of the ‘shotgun method.'” In Grinnell's opinion, this change was not only a threat to the future of ornithology but a possible threat to the entire scientific method: