Last Days of the Condor?

By Jamie Murphy

At two strategic places on the rim of California's San Joaquin Valley, men kneel in gravelike pits. Camouflaged with grass, they await their prey. A stillborn calf lies as bait within inches of each of the earthen blinds. Nearby, other men squat beside a row of four metal cannons, ready to fire weights attached to a 40-ft. by 50-ft. net. Frustrated, they all scan the sky, hoping that the wintry clouds collecting on the horizon do not close in. The 20-lb. Gymnogyps californianus rarely seeks food on stormy days.

The patient hunters are researchers. Their challenging assignment: to begin capturing the last six California condors in the wild. These and 21 other birds in captivity are the only remnants of the once plentiful species, which has a wingspan of nearly 10 ft. and is North America's largest land bird. Fearing that the free birds may not survive much longer, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week recommended that they all be trapped and transported to California zoos where the others are housed.

Until last week, the service had hedged its bets on the condors' survival, taking the position that only three of the bald, beady-eyed carrion eaters should be brought in from the cold. But officials had become increasingly worried about the giant birds, which have been the object of an intensive six- year, $6 million preservation program. Since the fall of 1984, six of the known wild condors have been lost. One died from eating a lead slug in a carcass that was left behind by hunters. The others, which may also have succumbed to lead poisoning, have simply disappeared. The last wild breeding female has been trapped, briefly detained and found to have high levels of lead in its blood.

The decision of the Wildlife Service was immediately attacked by the Audubon Society. While it acknowledges that the wild birds are in imminent danger of extinction, the society maintains that condors kept in zoos grow used to humans and may not survive when they are reintroduced into their natural habitat. By capturing all the free birds, says Audubon Biologist Jesse Grantham, "we'll be ending a culture in the wild, and we won't be able to bring it back."

Audubon, along with Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club, is considering legal action to halt the condor roundup. The three groups point out that the birds have never bred in captivity and that the dozen hatched in zoos came from eggs taken from nests in the wild; capture of the last six wild condors, they fear, may mean no more eggs. Finally, the environmentalists say, without any condors in the wild, it will be harder to resist the pressure of developers who want to build in the birds' natural habitats. Should the day come when biologists attempt to reintroduce condors into the wild, their natural environment could very well no longer exist.

The Wildlife Service acknowledges these drawbacks but feels that its decision to try to breed captive condors offers the only hope for survival of the species. Arthur Risser, an ornithologist at the San Diego Zoo, agrees: "We can't compromise when they're so close to extinction."

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/San Diego