Many Days of the Condor for Tracker

Snuggled into a fold-up chair, binoculars in hand, Mike Stockton drinks in the sweeping vistas of his home away from home--thousands of acres of the Los Padres National Forest.

With chewing tobacco beneath his bottom lip and deep smile lines around his brilliant blue eyes, Stockton spends most of his waking moments monitoring the California condor--a behemoth of a bird that scientists say hasn’t changed since woolly mammoths roamed North America.

Stockton, 49, tramps across the remote reaches of the forest, following signals on an electronic receiver and recording practically every flap of the birds’ giant, 9-foot wings. He works for the condor recovery program, an arm of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that has been returning condors to the wild since they faced near extinction more than a decade ago.

The birds circle chaparral hills, flying in elegant loops without flapping their massive wings. Their grace contrasts with their huge beak--used to rip into the dead flesh they thrive upon. As North America’s largest bird, the condor reminds some of an airborne dinosaur.

“They’re perfect animals,” Stockton said. “They weren’t going extinct naturally. We almost wiped them out. We should be the ones to keep them going.”

Over the years, critics have disagreed. Opponents said that saving the endangered bird would be a huge waste of public money. Environmentalists prevailed, however, and thanks to a breeding program at two Southern California zoos, 55 condors now fly in the wild, 16 of them soaring above the Los Padres National Forest where San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Kern and Ventura counties meet.

The birds fly around the ridges of the Cuyama Valley, less than 75 miles northeast of Ojai as the condor flies. But it takes Stockton and others in the recovery program more than three hours to get there by car.

The program, staffed by four full-time biologists and a rotating bunch of volunteers and interns, closely but unobtrusively follows the birds’ progress. They keep meticulous notes on where they fly, which birds keep company with one another and how they behave. Workers also trouble-shoot, rescuing a bird with a hurt leg or shooing them away from developed areas when they get too close to people.

Stockton’s 10-day “workweek” involves seven days in the field, three days of office work followed by four days off. He leaves his Ventura office Tuesdays with a week’s supply of food from home and a beat-up suitcase.

After an hour and a half drive northeast from California 33, Stockton stops in Ventucopa, a remote high-desert town with a gas station, a few pistachio groves and sauna-hot breezes.

From there he heads directly to a dairy farm, where flies buzz around hundreds of penned-up cows. In the back, where the veal calves moo plaintively, he is sometimes lucky enough to find a stillborn calf lying in the dirt, its hooves almost clear and its stomach bloated.

The dairy leaves its young dead animals out for the program to collect, put in a freezer and eventually haul into the wilderness for a carrion feast.

On a bumpy dirt road to Lion’s Canyon, he drives a painfully slow 90 minutes through canyons and ragged rock cliffs to a dilapidated green trailer. There the cows will sit in the sweltering sun and defrost until he is ready to haul them on a cart or game carrier up a steep hill under cover of darkness.

At the trailer Stockton grabs his electronic tracking device, climbs a nearby hill and scans the skies for condors. His demeanor changes in the open hills. He is less talk-your-ear-off chatty, more focused. He trades observations via walkie-talkie with a partner on a hilltop 40 miles away.

“I’ve got a weak signal on G-81,” his partner Tom Williams said from a rock formation near Castle Crags. “She’s coming your way.”

Spotting a condor is very hit and miss. Not only can the birds be anywhere--they can fly as far as 55 miles in an hour--but only seven of them still had the transmitter devices they were released with. The other nine devices had either fallen off or stopped working.

After 20 minutes, three giant birds appeared on the horizon in formation, like bomber planes.

Although he could not tell which birds these were, he recounted his favorite birds’ personalities as if they were family.

“R-8 is the prettiest. She’s always been my special bird,” he said.

“R-7 was the dominant bird, but he broke his toe and now his position has been usurped.”

“W-0 is the bully. Now he’s the dominant one.”

The birds’ names correspond to the color tag they wear--R for red, for example--and the number relates to their birthing sequence. The technical names also are intended to keep biologists from getting too attached to the birds.

Many people think condors are gigantic vultures, but the birds have striking differences. Although they belong to the same family, a condor’s underbelly resembles a white triangle, different from the dark underbelly of a turkey vulture. Condors are almost twice as big. They breed less frequently. And vultures will kill animals that are near death, while condors wait patiently, often for days, until an animal dies.

Stockton’s winged charges are about 6 years old--adolescent, by condor standards, considering they have a life span of up to 50 years. Because they are young, rowdy and curious they occasionally tear into shingles or solar panels in a community called Pine Mountain Club in southern Kern County. In captivity the birds were taught to avoid power lines and people--two sources of danger. However, since the first release in 1992, several have died in run-ins with both. Five birds have died of lead poisoning from eating carrion that had been shot with lead bullets.

The birds have yet to breed in the wild, but Stockton and others hope they will within a few years.

Stockton spends the rest of the quickly fading day looking futilely into the sky and trading observations with his partner. He fixes supper, drinks a beer and waits until a pink sunset spreads across the sky before struggling to push the two thawing carcasses up a steep hill.

Stockton’s job, which includes a fair amount of strenuous manual labor, is what he calls “my heart and soul.” Before this, Stockton spent 15 years as a conductor for the Southern Pacific Railroad before returning to school at Humboldt State University for a degree in wildlife biology.

In 1995, with three adult children, Stockton and his wife, Denise, joined the Peace Corps in Uruguay. After three years there, establishing a wildlife refuge and teaching English, the Stocktons returned to Oregon, where Mike Stockton applied for environmental jobs. The condor recovery program was his first choice.

The condor recovery program has a steady supply of employees with such interests. Because of limited staffing, the program relies heavily on volunteers, mostly people passionate about preserving the condor, to supplement its paid staff.

It costs about $1 million a year to monitor and protect the birds, with most of the funds coming from the federal government.

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Condor Comeback

California condors are rebounding after nearly becoming extinct 16 years ago. Record numbers of juveniles are being bred in captivity and released, more are surviving in the wild and some appear ready to mate. Condors remain the most imperiled bird in the nation, but scientists are increasingly optimistic about their chances for recovery.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service