We may have seen condors once, circling over Big Sur...
Posted by DeLong at June 13, 2003 02:31 AM | TrackBackAdolescent Condors Raised in Captivity Must Be Taught How Adults Behave: ... Once airborne, each bird is tracked from dawn to dusk. Every three nights, crew members haul in dead dairy calves to the holding pens and to the rocks around the release site for the birds that stick around. Young birds tend to stay put for a few months, eating the offered food. Older birds periodically fly in to lounge, loaf and feed.
Supervising adolescent condors, Ms. Osborn says, is like running a middle school. Birds get good marks for playing well with others, staying wary of people, finding food in the wild, feeding aggressively and staying within the 73,898 square mile range of the condor recovery program.
Most of the birds do extremely well, Ms. Osborn said. Condor 246, the best food-finder, once spotted a huge dead bull, called the refrigerator, that he and others fed on for three weeks. Condor 176 is an ace flier who likes to zip up to Zion National Park 60 to 70 miles away for short and long visits.
Condor 249 amused everyone when he was released last fall on an extremely windy day. The first time he spread his wings outside a cage, he shot 1,000 feet into the air and disappeared. It was three days before he made his way back to the release site.
The South Rim Gang hangs out at Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim, a gathering spot for condor entertainment and food. Dead deer, elk, sheep, cows and mules are plentiful.
As four million tourists stroll along the rim each season, these birds fly off rocky ledges or "diving boards" below the ice cream stands and hotels. They frolic in a leaky water pipe out of harm's way.
Tourists are delighted, Chris Parish, the project's director, said. Once a condor takes wing, soaring through the slanting red hues of a Grand Canyon sunset, park visitors have been known to break into applause. May and June are the best months to see them, he said.
On the other hand, Ms. Osborn said, "young condors can get into trouble so quickly." Early in the program, two condors flew to Grand Junction, Colo., and strolled into a visitors center. A pair in California famously tore through the screen door of a private home and were found sitting on a living room couch.
Shoelace birds are the worst, Ms. Osborn said. They stand on hiking trails or picnic areas and let tourists approach. When someone gets close, the condor lunges and rips off the person's shoelaces. She theorizes that the laces resemble entrails. Other than this behavior, no condor has ever shown any aggression toward a tourist.
Condor 250 "was a menace from the start," Ms. Osborn said. Released in December, he soon flew to Plateau Point, a popular observation spot part way down the canyon.
There he played with walking sticks and jacket sleeves held out to him by tourists. Later he landed on trails and stood watching the people go by, letting them approach to take his picture. "He's entered the ranks of the most awful condors," she said.
Condor 203, another famous troublemaker, last year followed a raven into an empty campground. Ravens are a bad influence on condors, Ms. Osborn said. Like coyotes, squirrels and deer in the canyon, they beg for food. It may be all right for a raven to hop around a person's feet but it is bad for the large condor to do so, she said.
No. 203 then walked over to a camping goods store in the village and banged on the windows. When he could not get in, he flew onto the roof of the park superintendent's house. He was finally cornered in a shed and removed to Vermilion Cliffs. Naughty condors have pulled tents apart, ridden on backhoes, bounced on top of canvas-covered water tanks, sneaked up on people napping in remote places, started rock slides, chased helicopters and played around with food thrown to them by tourists.
"Since our condors are released without their parents around to teach them to fear humans, part of our job is to give them a scare and haze them whenever they come close to humans," said Roger Benefield, a field crew member who works the South Rim. "I throw gravel and snow at them," he said. "I want them to hate my guts."
But condors are tenacious and intelligent. Despite hazing, some of them persist in approaching people, learning to recognize individual members of the field crew. As a result, crew members often have to hide in tourist groups to get close enough to throw a net.
But encountering tourists is only one of the birds' problems, Ms. Osborn said. As a result of eating carrion that contains lead pellets, the birds must be captured twice a year for lead testing and, if necessary, injected with agents that remove lead from blood. Newly released birds are also threatened by coyotes that prowl the release site. Because young birds do not have the flight skills to land on steep cliff faces, they are often tempted to roost on the rim or flatter bits of terrain, Ms. Osborn said, and once a condor dozes off, it sleeps soundly all night long.
So field crew members harass young birds at dusk until they take refuge on steeper perches, usually a huge rock face that resembles the shape of Africa. If they fail to do this, the field crew will camp out nearby even in freezing weather to protect the bird through the night.
One final danger -- hunters -- is beyond the control of the field crew. Two birds were shot last fall, one as it perched in a snag above a canopy of scrub oak, near a deer carcass and dirt road. The deaths are being investigated.
Then, there is the question of sex. This spring, two pairs were incubating an egg apiece in caves high above the canyon floor. Both pairs laid eggs last year but broke them before they hatched, typical behavior for young condors learning how to breed. One has already broken this year's egg while the other pair continues to take turns in the egg cave, which by now may hold a chick.
If this pair succeeds this year, it will be the first time that wild condors have been present in the Grand Canyon since 1924.
But the birds also appear to miss parental guidance when it comes to reproduction. To the consternation of the field crew, four condors have engaged in what appears to be group sex. One female in the group laid an egg but the others soon broke it.
The goal of the recovery program is to see 150 wild birds flying free and reproducing in Arizona, Ms. Osborn said.
"We can't go back to the Pleistocene but we can try to make our world safe for condors," she said, looking overhead at 10 of the giant birds. "Their wind in their wings makes this incredible hissing sound."
"He's entered the ranks of the most awful condors," she said.
Great quote. Great post, with an almost flawless tone (I take issue with "The naughty birds" as cutesy, the menace avoided throughout). This has even cheered me up about the New York Times.
Dear Anne,
Do you have a blog/website? I am always happy to see your comments. If you want, drop me a line.
Respectfully,
That's one in the eye for the hope that we can reconstruct ecosystems with no more than genetic samples of their species.
Good SF story, really; raising the obnoxious and overintelligent adolescents of a nearly-lost species.
Posted by: clew on June 12, 2003 01:44 PM"Not nature but culture..." Even condor behavior. Huh.
Posted by: Randolph Fritz on June 12, 2003 06:40 PM"Their wind in their wings makes this incredible hissing sound."
typo? took me a minute.
Posted by: david on June 13, 2003 06:59 AMAnd we're sure these birds are worth saving, right?
Posted by: Ezra on June 16, 2003 08:01 PMAnd we're sure these birds are worth saving, right?
Posted by: Ezra on June 16, 2003 08:02 PMEzra,
these birds are NOT cute. They are not friendly and they do not make nice chirping sounds.
they are not easy to handle and they feed on dead and dying stuff. when threatened, they 'defend' themselves by vomiting.
they hunt in packs and will run away from any live creature.
are they 'worth' saving?
such a moronic question can only come from soemone who is completely convinced of man's 'dominion' over the animals.
on the flip side, they are on top of the food chain, they prevent the spread of disease among animals and make sure that the garbage is collected.
are they worth saving? is garbage worth picking up?
you tell me.
Posted by: Suresh Krishnamoorthy on June 18, 2003 05:51 AMSomeone explain to me why Mickey Kaus is worth saving.
Posted by: Fabio on June 18, 2003 05:58 PMMickey Mouse has the integrty of a snail. [I like snails, but they really do not have integrity.]
Posted by: moen on June 19, 2003 09:51 AM"are they worth saving? is garbage worth picking up?"
"you tell me."
Your inclusion of this point invalidates your other point that merely asking this question is moronic.
It seems to me that it's a perfectly reasonable to ask whether a given species is worth saving. For practical reasons (there are limited, insufficient resources available to protecting and restoring endangered species and therefore we must choose wisely which we decide to protect and which we do not), certainly. And although I'm tempermentally inclined to agree with the conclusion that we have some sort or moral responsibilty to protect many species from extinction (particularly those threatened as a result of our own actions), I'm *not* convinced that there's that hugely strong of a rational basis for that conclusion. Interestingly, whether or not a particular animal has a right to life and ethical treatment seems to me to be much more clear than the abstract "good" associated with the continued physical existence of a species.
But then, similarly, I really couldn't care less whether or not humans remain "human"--an abstractly similar issue that many, or most, other people feel strongly (affirmatively) about.
I often think that there's a hidden moral conservatism involved in these sorts of things that sees retaining the status quo as inherently good. But that point of view is as mysterious to me as the point of view that sees the status quo as inherently bad (progressivism).
Oh, well.
Posted by: Keith M Ellis on June 19, 2003 05:37 PMInteresting comments Suresh and Keith -
What I do know is that I will change appointments and go to significant lengths to try to rescue an "ordinary" robin lying hurt on a lawn. [The robin is now fine and released.] I do not know why, but I think it most important.
Posted by: lise on June 20, 2003 08:13 AMI haven't seen a new post from Brad in about a week. Is this condor post the latest one? Just want to make sure there's not something wrong with my computer.
Posted by: Bobby on June 20, 2003 08:44 AMIt's been my assumption that he's on vacation and that my computer (or this one) is working fine. I've kept coming back here, even to this comments thread, hoping for confirmation. I should have just asked, as you have. Anyone?
Posted by: Keith M Ellis on June 20, 2003 08:46 AMLise, that's empathy (as of course you know), and it's a Good Thing(tm). It's not only an essential virtue, but I think it's perhaps an essential component of human nature and people lacking it are less than human in a signifncant respect.
On the other hand, like many intuitive virtues, it needs to be rationalized. Unrationalized it can become a vice, since it is *intuitively* driven by superficial markers of similarity. Thus, white people may lack empathy for black people because they superficially look different whereas a rationalized empathy recognizes a) the similarity that truly exists, and, b) where dissimilarity doesn't really matter.
Robins are "cute", so are baby seals. Other animals are not, and the less attractive (usually exhibiting less of the mammalian baby face) animals are often either neglected or destroyed and certainly endangered species that are unattractive receive less attention and protection. That's wrong, and it's an example of empathy going awry.
This goes back to my point that there needs to be a good rational argument for the protection of species that goes beyond emotional preference. Intuitive, emotionally laden arguments can lead us ultimately to places we wouldn't have chosen to be had we known what the true implications of them were.
Preserving all species from extinction on this planet is, first of all, not possible. But even if it were, excepting man's destruction of the environment, it's not clear to me how holding the ecosystem in an artificial status quo is good in a "natural" sense, since doing so would be very unnatural. On the other hand, there's no good reason to assume that what is completely "natural" is preferable, either.
I'm far more open to a utilitarian argument for the preserveration of a species than I am for one based upon emotional or semi-mystical foundations. Fortunately for all those endangered species, I think strong utilitarian arguments for their preservation can be, and are, made.
Posted by: Keith M Ellis on June 20, 2003 09:03 AMKeith, I agree with your argument. But, but, but there is more than cuteness or an imputed utility to valuing a robin. When I was quite young I visited an exhibit of the "future." I was struck even then that the future as GM would have it seemed to have no place for birds, cute or not, or spiders for that matter. There are ties among benign living things that would seem to need to be cultivated and I will think how.
Posted by: lise on June 20, 2003 10:14 AMPerhaps a better word, that avoids the magical and mystical ability to ascribe fellings and thoughts to creatures who are unrelated, is compassion. It is an admirable quality to feel compassion not just for humans but for any creature. This should be a way of being.
A utilitarian explanation for why we should try to save endangered species is that we can learn so much from the process of trying to save them and perhaps, like the canary in the cage, they will warn us of our own demise.
Posted by: Barbara on June 20, 2003 03:54 PM