Saving the California condors -- slowly and at high cost

FILLMORE, Calif. -- Every Thursday, Bill Langford heads to the grassy hills above Fillmore, Calif., pulls out his spotting scope and spends eight hours monitoring each flick and flitter of a pair of California condors raising a young chick.

Sitting on a camouflage chair a half-mile from the nest, Langford marks when the chick flaps its wings and demands to be fed, when the parents preen their feathers, when they sleep and when they fly and every other subtle movement.

Langford is one part of a larger team working nonstop to watch over this and three other condor nests in the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, the heart and soul of the California condor recovery effort.

The process is extraordinarily labor intensive and expensive, and it needs to be examined to determine how to continue to adequately care for the birds that were once the poster children for the Endangered Species Act, according to a recent report.

"Condors are maintained in the wild only with great effort, so much so that one might argue that they constitute little more than outdoor zoo populations," said a recent study by the American Ornithologists' Union, which takes a hard look at the recovery efforts and where they need to go to be successful. "The success that has been achieved to date has come only with enormous investment in intense monitoring and management."

Though there are now 330 condors among captive and wild populations, up from just 22 in 1982, it costs more than $5 million a year to run the program. That figure is likely to increase as the populations get bigger and the pressures from new development and other issues arise.

"The program has reached a crossroads, caught between the financial and logistical pressures required to maintain an increasing number of condors in the wild and the environmental problems that preclude establishment of naturally sustainable, free-ranging populations," says the report, which is as much a review of what the project has done as a guideline of where it needs to go.

Along with nearly round-the-clock monitoring, feeding providing them West Nile virus vaccinations, bird protectors check the young every month for traces of metal in their bodies. If metal is detected, the birds are sometimes flown to Los Angeles via helicopter for emergency surgery before being returned to their nests, where biologists have stood guard until the chicks are returned safely.

The sources are lead bullets and "microtrash" in the condors' habitat, the report found.

Though California recently banned hunters from using lead bullets, the process of change is slow. The irony is that hunting is crucial to the birds' survival: Because so few native deer and elk roam their habitat anymore; they need lead-free carcasses and gut piles on which to feast.

The issue of microtrash also poses a major obstacle. Adult birds bring pieces of small trash -- bottle caps, pull-tab can tops, glass -- into the nests, where the young eat them. Over time, the trash forms a lump inside the bird, starving the animal if it's not removed.

Jesse Grantham, California condor coordinator at Hopper Mountain, said it's possible the birds evolved needing hard substances to help them digest. But humans and all their trash came along created an overload.

Now, when researchers check the nests, they remove the trash and replace it with ground-up bones, which could serve the same purpose and decompose in the bird.

Grantham said the program has come a long way since 1982, when the only California condors remaining in the world were the 22 that had been captured and brought into captivity for breeding. Now, 156 of the birds roam the skies above Southern California, Utah, Arizona and Mexico.

Every year, about 35 new birds are born in the wild or in captivity, where they are either used for breeding or soon released into the wild. But how large the population needs to get to be self-sufficient or how long that might take is unknown.

Grantham is hopeful that in the next few years, the lead issue will fade away and the microtrash problem will become more manageable. Volunteers and staffers now go out and scour the landscape and remove any trash where condors frequent.

The birds face other obstacles, including the possibility of DDT poisoning from eating dead marine mammals.

"The role of condors as canaries in the vast coal mine of western North America thus may continue," the report says. "We believe that recovery of the California condor, once almost inconceivable, is possible."

The report lists more than a dozen recommendations of what needs to happen in the future to increase condor populations, including: increase the visibility of the recovery efforts to the public and hunters; alter the feeding program to spread the population out; examine how DDT might be a future detriment; add permanent staff members to the project; and reorganize the structure of the staff.

In recent years, there has been a growing chorus of people around the country questioning how much money and time has to be spent to save a species, and some are calling for the repeal of the Endangered Species Act.

But Grantham said to stand by and let die off the largest bird to ever soar America's skies would be a crime.

"I don't think we are at a point where we are willing to give up on a species," he said. "When we get to that point, you open a Pandora's box of what stays and what goes, and I don't think we'll ever willingly let biological systems unravel."

(Contact Zeke Barlow of the Ventura County Star in California at zbarlow(at)venturacountystar.com.)