Peter Bloom with AC9. Photo by Helen Snyder.
April 19th: Today is a special day in conservation history – the day the last wild California Condor was captured in 1987.
This was not just a simple capture of an iconic bird – behind this effort was a tangled web of legal and ethical issues that had an entire team of dedicated biologists fighting for what they could only hope was the right choice. Leading that team was Pete Bloom, an experienced raptor biologist with years of trapping large birds like Golden Eagles under his belt. At the time, the plight of the California Condor was quite dire, and no one knew if these efforts would even make a difference. The stories that unfolded are the stuff of legend, with a little bit of drama tossed in for good measure.
To understand the significance of this day, a little history is required. Most people now are able to recognize the obligate scavengers with their smooth peach-colored heads and impressively huge black wings that span almost 10 feet; but this was not always the case. While the animal known as the “Thunderbird” was revered by Indigenous tribes in North America, early settlers found them to be fearsome and disgusting, not understanding the California Condor’s important role as an apex species. Just as they killed bears and wolves, these settlers indiscriminately killed thousands of condors just so they wouldn’t have to share the landscape with them. And this tradition carried on, even into the mid-20th century when many people dismissed these majestic birds as “flying garbage cans”. The elimination of apex species have certainly wreaked havoc on the ecosystems of the United States, and created trickle-down problems that we still suffer the consequences of today.
California Condor in flight. Photo By Jean Beaufort (public domain).
The California Condor is one of the few remaining animal species in the world with its beginnings in the Pleistocene era (the “Ice Age”). They have seen the extinction of other historically notorious species like saber-toothed tigers, mammoths and the giant ground sloth, a fate they themselves narrowly avoided. The massive wings of the California Condor allow them to soar at heights of up to 15,000 feet, reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour, and effortlessly travel up to 150 miles per day by riding the thermals. Unlike Turkey Vultures, they do not have an extraordinary sense of smell, and instead rely on their keen eyesight to find carrion. Their beaks are strong enough to tear through the tough hides of large mammals, making it easier for other smaller scavengers to feed and ultimately remove dead animals from the environment. The carcasses would otherwise rot and potentially introduce bacteria and diseases affecting humans, wildlife and livestock. They have very robust immune systems, and their bald heads are easier to keep clean without feathers. California Condors often live communally and will sometimes work together to break apart large carcasses. They are methodical and resilient creatures, taking their time with almost every aspect of their lives. They often stake out carcasses for a few days before they start to feed. They might devour 2-3 lbs of carrion during a feeding session but then slowly allow that meal to digest, often not needing to feed again for several days. They have no voice box or syrinx like other birds, and use behavior and body posturing to communicate to other condors. Sometimes at close range you might hear them make grunting noises. Successful breeding pairs are typically monogamous and will raise only one chick at a time. The chick stays with its family for up to two years, learning important strategies and behaviors that it will utilize for the rest of its long life (up to 50-60 years!). A California Condor will start searching for a mate of its own when they are about 6 years old. This slow reproductive rate was one factor, when added to several other pressures, caused their wild population to decline.
The other major factors were all anthropogenic – habitat loss, purposeful or accidental killing by shooting, the use of poison as a means to control perceived pest animals, gutpiles and carcasses tainted with lead bullet fragments left behind by hunters, exotic egg collectors, powerline strikes and electrocutions, as well as the pervasive use and disposal of environmental toxins such as methylmercury and DDT. The National Audubon Society first started studying California Condors in 1939; at that time the population had been diminished from thousands to approximately a mere 100 individuals. The Audubon Society decided to support the doctoral research of Carl Koford, who went on to publish his landmark report on California Condors in 1953. At the insistence of the Audubon Society, two U.S. Forest Service Condor Sanctuaries were established, both in southern California, in the 1940’s.
For the next 50 years, vehemently opposing groups fought over the best way to save the species, with one side wanting a more hands-on approach (captive breeding, etc.), while the other side wanted to allow nature to take its course, and only provide hands-off assistance like securing land preserves, etc. The San Diego Zoo obtained a captive breeding permit in early 1952, which was soon revoked due to lawsuits by the Audubon Society and other conservation groups after the Zoo’s first attempts failed. The next big milestone occurred in 1971, when the California Condor was one of the first animals to gain legal protection status under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Around 1976, a naturalist from Santa Barbara named Dick Smith discovered a pair of nesting condors in a restricted area of the San Rafael Wilderness, but the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) required him to have a biologist accompany him during his research. At the time, most biologists in the area were busy doing research projects in the Channel Islands, but a museum biologist named Jan Hamber was available. She had been working for the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum since 1959, and had always wanted a chance to do field research outdoors. Jan proved herself to be a hard-working fast learner and an invaluable asset in the field, so when Dick Smith died unexpectedly in 1977, Jan was urged to continue his work. She was put in charge of several condor nest monitoring posts including the Santa Barbara pair discovered by Dick Smith.
By 1980, the Audubon Society was beginning to favor the hands-on approach and created the Condor Research Center together with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services (USFWS). But not too long into the research efforts, a condor chick died after being handled in the nest, which caused public outrage, especially from smaller Audubon chapters such as the Golden Gate Audubon, and for the next two years biologists were unable to have contact with any wild condors. In 1982, Pete Bloom was asked to lead the condor trapping effort, this time with all the necessary permits and handling experience to prevent any other casualties. His level of knowledge and experience in safely trapping, tagging, banding and studying large birds like Turkey Vultures and Golden Eagles was unparalleled. At the time, he was still surveying goshawks for the California Department of Fish & Game, a project that had started in 1981. But he decided that this condor project could really make a difference for the conservation of a rapidly-declining species, and he wanted to be a part of it.
All captured California Condors were tagged and transmittered prior to release so that they could be monitored. The condors were assigned a number, following the letters either “AC” (“Adult Condor”), or “IC” (“Immature Condor”). Later in 1982, the first condor chick was taken into captivity after being neglected by his parents (AC8 and her unnamed mate), who were still caring for a chick from the previous year. The captured chick was successfully raised at the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park (now Safari Park), and was given the name XolXol (pronounced hol-hol, a Chumash word meaning "one of the sky people."). At the time, AC8 and her mate, along with the Santa Barbara pair, were two of only five successful breeding pairs remaining in the wild.
The Condor Research team knew that the fate of an entire species rested on their shoulders, a weight even heavier than the 50-60 lb. backpacks they trekked with to the blinds constructed near the trapping sites. They hid in those blinds for the entire day, anytime a condor was reported to be in the area. The traps consisted of a cannon net powered by four mortars with blasting caps in a 50 foot line spaced about 12 feet apart near a carcass. The mortars were dangerous and had to be tested constantly to ensure that everything was set just right. Any minor error could result in a human or condor casualty. Neither of those possibilities were acceptable to the team, who were all working desperately to prevent any further condor deaths.
To hide the presence of humans near these traps, no one could leave the blinds for any reason, and the team endured extreme heat, bitter cold, cramped quarters, and the occasional rattlesnake or black widow. They kept in constant contact with each other via radios. A spotter would let the trapping team know if a condor was approaching, and then it would be radio silence while the trappers waited with bated breath for a condor to land in just the right position. Sometimes the condor would circle the carcass several times and then simply fly away. Pete had the idea that the condors were possibly becoming wise to their trapping schemes, so he designed and implemented a pit trap, based on a method used by the Hidatsa Indigenous tribe to capture eagles along the Missouri river. The pit trap was even more confining than the blind and was nothing more than a 6’x3’x3’dirt hole covered by plywood and straw.
A small opening would allow the trapper inside to quickly grab a target bird by both legs as it walked by. Although waiting for the birds could be tedious, Pete liked to call this opening his “Pleistocene window” and has described his experience of observing nature from such a vantage point as unrivaled. He asserts that, despite being cramped and surrounded by dirt, the pit trap remains “absolutely one of the most exciting places on earth”. He would be surrounded by ravens, Golden Eagles, Turkey Vultures, and if he was lucky, a California Condor. They were all completely oblivious to him, and he could watch them behave naturally in a landscape that had remained practically unchanged for 10,000 years.
Pete’s pit trap proved to be a great alternate method for trapping in several different locations; five California Condors were captured this way, two of those by another trapping biologist, Dave Clendenen. But any success the team felt was soon to be overshadowed, and life for California Condors in the wild would suddenly take a turn for the worse. In the fall of 1984, an otherwise healthy young condor (IC1) died unexpectedly, and blood tests determined lead poisoning to be the cause; a copper-jacketed bullet fragment was found in his body. From then until the end of 1985, six condors (including AC8’s mate) disappeared suddenly, and an additional three wild condors died from lead poisoning and a fourth died from cyanide contained in a coyote-killing device. Despite these tragic events, the National Audubon Society was optimistic that the population could still be saved with the 14 eggs and chicks that had successfully formed a genetic nucleus in the captive breeding program, along with the one remaining wild breeding pair in Santa Barbara. But when the USFWS disagreed, stating they wanted to immediately capture the remaining condors, the Audubon Society sued their own partner in the program. The Audubon Society argued they could instead provide “clean” carcasses and simply monitor the last few wild birds rather than take them all into captivity. The hope was that some condor chicks could continue to be produced in the wild. They were also concerned that protections for condor habitat would be lifted if there were no wild condors to protect it for.
Photo By Dave Clendenen
Lawsuits halted the program for months at a time, and during those downtimes, Pete would instead focus on trapping Golden Eagles, studying their blood lead levels. He captured over 100 Golden Eagles using the pit trap. Although these large eagles most often hunt and kill their own food sources, they will occasionally take an easy meal at a carcass. Pete found that even though their diet consisted of less than 50% carrion, at least 1/3 of the Golden Eagles tested had elevated levels of lead in their blood. Lead would continue to be one of the most dangerous toxins in the environment and was clearly affecting more than just the endangered condors.
Then in 1985, the female of the Santa Barbara breeding pair, AC3, became critically ill with lead poisoning – she was captured and taken to the San Diego Zoo, but she did not survive. She died from lead poisoning on January 18th, 1986. Because the death occurred during the course of a lawsuit and subsequent restraining order, many people blamed the AC3’s death on the inability of conservationist groups to come to an agreement on how to save the last remaining California Condor. And now, most importantly, there was only one unpaired female left in the wild, AC8, whose original partner had died the previous year. She was courted by all the remaining males, but she ultimately chose a young male (AC9), then six years old, as her mate. Their first egg was crushed – the shell was too thin, a victim of DDT. The second fertile egg from that last condor pair was taken to the San Diego Wild Animal Park (now Safari Park). The egg was hatched successfully and the chick was named Nojoqui. AC8 was captured on June 5th 1986. Now, only three males (AC2, AC5, and AC9) existed in the wild, and at last it was decided the best course of action (though still with some outside opposition) would be to capture the remaining wild condors. This decision was made a little easier by the news that seven Andean Condors (close relatives of California Condors) had been reared in captivity and successfully reintroduced to a wild group in Peru. Prior to this there had been no successful attempts for the captive breeding or rearing of birds like condors. By September of 1986, final trapping permits were issued to Pete and his team at the Condor Research Center.
The first male, AC2, was captured in the pit trap in December of 1986. AC5 (also known affectionately to the research team as “Old Smudgepits”) was eventually trapped in 1987 after a late-February snowstorm had caused a shortage of food in the area. During AC5’s capture, AC9 was perched high in a tall oak tree nearby, inquisitively watching every move. To Pete and the team, the eerie image of AC9 watching them take away the only other of his kind would forever be etched in their minds. In April of 1987, the day before Easter, Jan Hamber saw AC9 circling the trap location, and made the fateful decision to alert the trapping team to report to the trap location the following morning. For this last capture, the team combined the two trapping techniques – they set up the cannon net around a goat carcass, but instead of a blind, the detonator cord was run to a pit trap about 100 feet away, where Pete waited anxiously. The intensity of this day cannot accurately be described in words, and thankfully video footage still exists, taken by conservationist and filmmaker John McNeely, with the approval of Pete and USFWS:
On April 21st, The Department of the Interior officially announced the capture, with a statement from William P. Horn, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks “Our goal remains the same – a healthy, self-sustaining population of California Condors in the wild. We plan to return what we have temporarily taken from nature at a time when we better understand the threats that the species faces in the wild, and when we are successfully producing new birds.”
The first captive-bred chick was born in 1988, and by 1992 there were over 50 California Condors in captivity. The first few releases of the zoo-raised condors in the Los Angeles National Forest proved to be a bit troublesome, with electrocutions and human habituation among the more serious problems. It was believed that this recklessness was due to a lack of guidance by experienced birds on the dangers of the wild. The program restructured their plans to include behavior modification and better chick-rearing techniques [insert link]. The remaining condors from the first releases were re-trapped and re-trained to avoid common dangers. To this day, all condors are tagged and tracked to continuously monitor their movements and lead levels.
One of the offspring of the original Santa Barbara pair is AC4, who was released in 2015, and flew straight back to the same Santa Barbara cliffs where he was born approximately 35 years ago. AC8 was released in April of 2000 in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in Ventura County, CA. AC9 spent several months in a flight pen at Hopper Mountain with three juveniles, and they were all released in May of 2002. At the time, only nine of the original wild-raised condors were still alive. They were the last birds to have learned survival skills from their wild parents, and the Condor team hoped that by releasing them at the same time as juveniles, they could act as mentors to the younger generations. Also in 2002, AC8 was found to be sick and was re-captured to be treated for extremely high levels of lead in her blood; she was re-released when healthy again around Christmas of 2002. Unfortunately, AC8 was shot and killed by a poacher in February of 2003 during a pig hunt at Tejon Ranch. The death of this beloved matriarch was a brutal blow to all the conservationists that had been working hard to secure protections for the still-endangered condors, but in a way her death only strengthened their resolve. AC9 found a new mate in 2004 (condor #192), producing several chicks until 2015 when 192 was found dead from lead poisoning. AC9 went missing in 2016 and is sadly presumed to be dead. In 2018, one of the offspring of AC9 and 192 (#526) was also shot and killed near the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, where her father had been captured 31 years previously. Other than shooting deaths, lead still remains one of the worst threats to California Condor survival. Lead ammunition has been banned in California for hunting, with the phase-out having begun in 2019. Several organizations are working hard to educate hunters, who are often conservationists themselves, about the hidden dangers of continuing to use lead ammunition. Since 2012, the Ventana Wildlife Society has exchanged 10,000 boxes of lead bullets, replacing them with copper ammunition, worth $250,000.
Today California Condors are released at five reintroduction sites in California, Arizona, and Baja California. Wild individuals and nests are all monitored by a large group of biologists, still working hard to protect the species. All of these reintroduction groups now work cooperatively and share a central database of information, to ensure the continued long-term success of the program. These organizations include Pinnacles National Park, the Peregrine Fund, Ventana Wildlife Society, the Yurok Tribe, Arizona Department of Fish & Game, Oregon Zoo, Los Angeles Zoo, San Diego Zoo, and Oakland Zoo, and others. On March 23rd of this year, a final federal ruling was announced enabling the Yurok Tribe along with USFWS and the National Park Service to operate a condor reintroduction facility in the northernmost region of their historical range. The Yurok Tribe Condor Restoration Program put in a tremendous amount of effort to make this plan a reality, including extensive environmental assessments and contaminant analyses of the Bald Hills region, which includes coastal areas south of the Klamath river, along with pristine redwood forests (Redwood National Park) inland. The location is ideal – studies of other obligate scavengers like Turkey Vultures have shown that lead levels are lower than in other reintroduction sites, and large mammals such as whales and seals that wash up on the shoreline tend to have lower levels of mercury. Relationships have been forged as far north as Portland Oregon to as far south as Sacramento California, in anticipation of the far-flying condor’s range. While this reintroduction program hasn’t suffered from the same dramatic and litigious quarrels as occurred towards the end of last century, some compromises have had to be made. The reintroduced condors will be classified as “experimental”, which means they will not be as fully protected under the Endangered Species Act like other California Condors, but any “take” (killing) must be unintentional and not due to any negligent conduct. Occupied nests that belong to the experimental group will be protected and most activities are prohibited within 200 meters, with the exception of wildfire management.
California Condors now have a population of over 500 individuals, with more than 300 of those living in their natural wild habitats. According to Pete, these numbers were unimaginable to him when he was in the thick of his trapping efforts. The capture of those last wild condors – while at times stressful, monotonous, and frustrating – are still the highlight of his professional career. Pete and his colleagues can now look on in pride as the successes of the California Condor keep rolling in. Because of the unwavering dedication of the Condor Research Center’s team, one of the best conservation stories can be told and retold, inspiring younger generations to work together to save our remaining biodiversity.
Written By: Nicollet Overby