Love Among the Condors

By Claudia Wallis

Feathers fly in the fight over how to save the big, ugly birds

The male lets out a cry that sounds like a rake being scraped over cement. He flaps his wings--which span 9 ft.--at a bird only another condor could love: an ungainly, 20-lb. female, with lugubrious black feathers, yellow eyes and a bald, orange head. She coyly nibbles at his neck, and off they fly, monogamous partners for life. They will produce a single 4 1/2-in. egg every two years, and their ugly infant will be dependent upon them for a year--or until he is old enough to find carrion for himself.

Pretty or not, that kind of romance has kept the California condor around since saber-toothed tigers roamed the Sierra Nevada. Whether the bird will continue to survive, however, has been in serious doubt since the last century. As North America's largest land bird, the condor has always made a seductively easy target. Indians prized its tough, 2-ft.-long feathers; 19th century hobbyists collected condor eggs, which could fetch $300. During the 1849 gold rush, its hollow quill feathers, waterproof and 1/2 in. in diameter, were favored as gold-dust containers. Even after the condor became a federally protected species in 1963, farming and development continued to destroy its habitat. Where condors once flourished by the thousands, all the way from Canada to Baja California, today fewer than 30 remain, living mainly in 54,000 acres of sanctuary north of Los Angeles.

Hoping to prevent the condor's "rapidly approaching extinction," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Audubon Society presented the state of California with a radical proposal. Under its three-year plan, 21 condors would be trapped, nine to be kept for breeding, twelve to be tagged and released with tiny radio transmitters clipped to the back of their wings, allowing biologists to track them and study their life cycle. Some condor protectionists objected. The birds, they argued, are extremely sensitive to human contact. A man standing 500 yds. away can keep a condor from its nest all day, and last year, when researchers attempted to weigh a two-month-old chick at its nesting site, the bird collapsed and died of shock and acute heart failure. Moreover, the California condor has yet to perform its mating ritual in a cage. Last month the state fish and game commission approved a more modest intervention: two birds to be radio-tagged and only three kept for breeding during the first year, one of them to be mated at the Los Angeles Zoo with Topa Topa, the only California condor now in captivity.

At the Sierra Club and among other environmentalist groups, feathers are flying over even that much meddling in condor affairs. Some are threatening legal action to protect the big birds from their protectors. Says David Phillips, spokesman for the San Francisco-based Friends of the Earth: "Human interference has already pushed the condor closer to extinction. It's inherently too risky." Maybe so. But William Conway, director of the New York Zoological Society, points out that captive breeding has already saved the elephant seal, down to 20 animals in 1890 and now back up to nearly 40,000. It has also helped raise the number of whooping cranes from 15 in 1941 to more than 100. "There is every reason to believe it will work with the condor," says Conway, "unless we wait and argue too long." --By Claudia Wallis

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