My Father, the Condor Man — Part 2
--
Here, in Ventura, Condors were not the only critical environmental concern that Dad was involved in. When I was three years old, the Union Oil corporation got a special dispensation from the federal government to ignore building safety permits on a new oil well which was being drilled between the Channel Islands and our coastal beaches. Sure enough, the lack of safety precautions proved devastating. In January, 1969, the new well began blowing a toxic mix of mud, oil, and natural gas at the rate of 9,000 gallons an hour into the ocean, swiftly generating a floating, toxic blob 35 miles long. The slick approached the shores. Pelicans and loons landed in the shiny black murk of the normally clean waters and found themselves rapidly coated in tar, making it impossible for them to fly or even swim. Thousands of their oil-coated bodies began washing up on shore along with the black sludge which subsequently killed the starfish, sea crabs, and barnacles which lived on the rocky jettys and boulders along the coast of Santa Barbara and Ventura.
Dad joined the bird-cleaning crews, trying to wipe the oil off the feathers of the birds with a mild-soapy bath, but few survived. Other volunteers spread straw across the beaches in an effort to soak up the tarry goo, but the damage to the marine creatures like anemones and mussels had already been done. Our beaches, despite the local people’s efforts, became a massive environmental graveyard.
The silver lining to the tragedy of the 1969 oil spill (still considered one of the worst in US history) was that it ultimately triggered a movement of protest against polluting corporations. These protests, led by academics, scientists, and even politicians eventually raised national environmental awareness to the point that the following year, in 1970, national protests formed which were later dubbed “Earth Day”. It took over a decade for corporate interests (and California state governor Ronald Reagan) to coopt and neuter Earth Day, rendering it a “leftist” fantasy which opposed industrial progress and prosperity. But, at least for a decade, Earth Day was a symbolic date for national environmental awareness.
Another environmental issue which Dad was engaged in during his Condor years in the 1960s and 1970s was opposition to DDT. Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane is a long-lasting insecticide that, once it is sprayed onto fields, can endure with a half-life of anywhere from one to thirty years, depending on conditions. In 1962 Rachel Carson published her chilling assessment of the effects of DDT on the environment in her aptly titled, Silent Spring. The “silence” to which she referred to in her eminently readable was not merely a silence caused by the death of bees, dragonflies, and other whirring insects, but also the death of bird populations. One of the effects of this long-lasting insecticide was that it weakened the eggshells of birds who ate insects on whom DDT was sprayed. When affected birds would sit on their own eggs in their nests, the simple weight of their bodies would crush the unusually fragile shells, thus aborting their own offspring in the nest. DDT was also carried by agricultural runoff into lakes, rivers, and oceans. In the local ocean waters, for example, DDT poisoned the waters and fish which bald eagles would catch and consume in their nests on the Channel Islands off our coast. The DDT passing through the fish caused the same problem with eggshells in bald eagles as it caused with insect-eating birds on the mainland. Though bald eagles had lived on the islands for thousands of years, with the advent of DDT their numbers began to drop precipitously.
Dad’s participation, though the Audubon Society, was initially concerned with the loss of bird life. But soon, for him, and the rest of scientists working on the Channel Islands, it became clear how Everything is Connected. Not only did the cries of the bald eagles grow silent on the islands, as Carson had warned, but the cute little yips of the island foxes, indigenous to the islands, began to grow faint as their numbers diminished. Island foxes, which grow to sizes of a large housecat, are incredibly inquisitive and spry critters. If you are walking along the trails on the islands, they are likely to follow you for a ways — not to get food (feeding them is strictly prohibited) but just to check you out and see what kind of critter YOU are. But in the 1990s island fox numbers began plummeting. This puzzled island researchers: why were island fox populations dropping? On San Miguel Island, in the early 1990s, there were about 400 island foxes, but by the middle of the decade, their numbers had collapsed to just a few dozen. It appeared they were going extinct.
DDT had been banned in California in 1972, so there was certainly no clear link between the land-bound island foxes and the use of that pesticide on the mainland from twenty years ago. This was before the discovery that half a million barrels of the banned substance had been dumped by the Monstrose chemical corporation off the coast of LA in the waters near the Channel Islands and were now leaking. This was causing the deaths and premature births of species ranging from jack fish to brown pelicans to sea lions and bottlenose dolphins, decades after the manufacture of the deadly chemical had been banned.[1] But the deaths of island foxes appeared to be “natural” — only it wasn’t really “nature” that had triggered their drop into potential extinction — it was humanity — because of DDT.
After the bald eagle population on the islands crashed due to their eggs breaking because of DDT in the eagles’ systems, golden eagles began to move onto the islands. The bald eagles had kept the golden eagles away previously, but now, with the bald eagles vanishing, golden eagles began nesting, undisturbed. And one of the most convenient food sources of the golden eagles turned out to be the cute, little, inquisitive, tasty Island Foxes. Thus it was that a toxic chemical, which had been ostensibly banned two decades earlier, was leading to the extinction of an endangered species which never even ingested DDT into their own food supplies.
By the 1990s my father was no longer working directly on the Condor Project. He had joined the fight against DDT in the 1960s through the 1980s (it was still being used and manufactured elsewhere in the US), but it was his previous condor work which also came to help save the Island Fox from extinction in the 2000s: the captive breeding program. But that comes later.
* * *
Despite the good-heartedness, dignity, and adventurousness of my father’s profession, there was a sad undercurrent beneath his work. I sensed this as I was growing up: the condor was dying out, going extinct. My father was, quite literally, the guardian of a vanishing species. The deer-rich native landscape which had flourished in harmony with the indigenous peoples of the region for over ten-thousand years had been converted by the Spanish into ranchland. This suited the California condor well: they were scavengers and a good feast was to be had with the corpses of cattle. But as the ranchland of Alta California was turned into the urban sprawl of Los Angeles and as city refugees escaped with their hunting rifles to the forests to shoot deer and bear and mountain lion with lead bullets (and a few condors as well, because, why the hell not?), the condor population began to crash. The lead bullets would be eaten by condors as they scavenged the carcasses left behind by reckless hunters, and poison them. The $500 fine for killing a condor was hardly a deterrent to those who wanted to “bag one” — particularly as the culprits were unlikely to ever get caught. When legislation was attempted to ban lead bullets, the NRA and associated gun-lobbies opposed any measures which would diminish their profits. Lead made for cheap bullets and helped sell more guns. My father never opposed hunting of deer, or waterfowl if they weren’t endangered. But, with the rise of Reagan, who characterized environmentalists’ desires to pass legislation such as banning lead bullets as “communism” and “big government intrusion”, the ability of nature conservationists (who used to work productively with hunters) began to decay as hunting became increasingly synonymous with libertarian gun rights and anti-regulatory sentiments among formerly-called “conservatives” who used to seek to “conserve” nature for sustainable use.
Nonetheless my father persevered, attempting to harmonize the gun lobby with the animal rights crusaders, to create dialogue between nature-loving Republicans who relished the freedom of the outdoors and big-city Democrats who promoted pollution controls, between long-haired hippies who wanted to get stoned in the woods and businessmen who wanted to see tourism flourish. But the forces of corporate profits, polarized politics, and habitat destruction outpaced my father’s attempts to save the species. By January of 1987 there were just 22 condors left alive on the planet; all of them were either in captivity or had radio devices attached to them to track their every move.
Home during my final Christmas in college, Dad drove me out to what has now become the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge. There were only four condors left flying free, circling on thermal drafts over the hills that flattened northwards into the San Joachin Valley. Mt. Pinos was to the east, the Carrizo plains to the west. And in front of us, as we looked down at them from the high perch of Hudson Ranch Road, we could see, in one single view, the flight of the four last wild California condors on the planet. By mid-April they would all be hauled into captivity and efforts would be made to breed them.
I sensed Dad had given up. It’s not that he opposed the captive breeding program into which the condors were being placed. It was merely that he was watching, after over 20 years of labor and love, the last wild and free birds being taken into cages to be experimented on and tested and probed and prodded and bred. He murmured to me, in words I know he rarely breathed aloud, “Maybe it’s time for them to go extinct.” We stood together silently, with the warm valley wind welling up the canyons into our faces, gazing at the very last free creatures of this incredibly unlikely species. This was a few months before they would be swept up in the artificial interventions of science and technology in an attempt to save them.
* * * * *
The California condor captive breeding program has become a great success story. From a population of 22, over 500 condors have been bred through the program, 300+ of which are in the wild and others are still in the captive breeding program. (The program became a model for the restoration of the Island Fox as well!) As for Tope, eventually, he was successfully paired up with a female and began to establish his genetic legacy. By 2016, at the time of Tope’s 50th birthday, he had sired over 20 chicks! Though my Dad had contact with each of the 27 condors he studied, Tope always remained his favorite.
This is not to say that the danger for condors has passed. There is always the danger that, in case of fire, condor chicks, too young to fly, will be incinerated in their nests. As the climate continues to destabilize and fires and floods increase, the condor will once again become increasingly in peril. But rather than end this tale on a dark note, let me recount an experience I had a couple of years after the turn of the millennium, in Utah.
I was on a rafting expedition which included Norge, Peter, and Lalo, heading on a seven day journey down the Green River. Three days in, while we were beside one of the other rafts, one of the rowers beside us with a pair of binoculars pointed at the sky and shouted, “Look! A California condor!”
I looked up. High above was a black speck. Golden eagle? Probably a turkey vulture. I snorted with derision at the wishful thinking that there could be a condor here. After all, I knew condors, and I knew some had been released in Baja California and Arizona, but… Utah? There were no releases there. Besides we were almost in the center of the state, so they weren’t going to just migrate north and hang out in the Canyonlands. I was subtle in my scorn, “Oh really?,” I said, innocently, “Have you seen a California condor before?”
“Nope,” came the honest reply, “But I know what they’re supposed to look like.”
“Oh, really? And what is that?” I almost sounded sincere in my enquiry.
“Big black birds with white triangles underneath’em,” he promptly replied, causing me to frown, since he was right in his description.
The black speck continued to circle above us, too far for me to see clearly. “Are you sure about those white patches?”
“Yep! Here — be careful!” he tossed me his binoculars across the water from his raft. Miraculously, I caught them. Even more miraculously, he was right: it was a California condor in the middle of Utah!
I was suddenly filled with pride in my Dad. Twenty years of depressing struggles to hang on to dwindling populations of these truly pre-historic birds, and here I was, reaping the fruits of what he had sown. I had not looked for a condor in the wild for nearly twenty years, ever since my father and I had stood on that canyon edge back in 1987. His life’s work, despite the despair, had been a success.
How many kids get to boast that their father was part of a team that saved a magnificent species? That is something worth celebrating for life!
* * * * *
[1] Rosana Xia, “L.A.’s coast was once a DDT dumping ground. No one could see it — until now” October 25, 2020. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground/
