It’s Many Days of the Condor for This U.S. Wildlife Biologist
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 Los Padres National Forest.
With chewing tobacco behind 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 the continent.
Stockton, 49, tramps the remote reaches of the forest, following signals on an electronic receiver and recording practically every flap of the bird’s giant, 9-foot-span 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 observers of an airborne dinosaur.
“They’re perfect animals,” Stockton says. “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 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 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 north of Ojai as the condor flies. It takes Stockton and others in the recovery program more than three hours to get there by car.
The program is staffed by four full-time biologists and a rotating bunch of volunteers and interns who closely but unobtrusively follow the birds’ progress. They keep meticulous notes on where the birds 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 the birds away from developed areas when they get too close to humans.
Stockton’s 10-day “workweek” involves seven days in the field and three days of office work, followed by four days off. He leaves his Ventura office on Tuesdays with a week’s supply of food and a beat-up suitcase.
After an hour-and-a-half drive northwest on Highway 33, Stockton stops in Ventucopa, a remote high desert town with a gas station, a few pistachio groves and sauna-hot breezes.
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 sometimes finds a stillborn calf lying in the dirt.
The dairy leaves its young dead animals out for the condor program to collect, put in a freezer and eventually haul into the wilderness for a carrion feast.
During a recent visit, Stockton grabs a dead calf by the legs and hoists it into his truck.
“A lot of folks get weak in the knees,” he says. “But it’s just a chunk of meat, and after it’s frozen, it’s dead weight. It would be flopping all around like this if we didn’t freeze them.”
After transporting one dead calf from the dirt to a freezer, Stockton struggles to hoist two 70-pound frozen ones from the meat locker to his truck.
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 calves will sit in the sweltering sun and defrost until Stockton is ready to haul them on a cart or game carrier up a hill under cover of darkness.
At the trailer, Stockton grabs his electronic tracking device, climbs a nearby hill and scans the skies. His demeanor changes in the open hills. He is less 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,” Tom Williams says from a rock formation near Castle Crags. “She’s coming your way.”
“Roger that. I’ll look out,” Stockton replies, turning his tracking device toward Castle Crags but not seeing anything in the slight haze.
Spotting a condor is very hit or miss. Not only can the birds be anywhere--they can fly as far as 55 miles in an hour--but only seven of the Los Padres birds still have the transmitter devices they were equipped with when released. The other nine devices have either fallen off or stopped working.
After 20 minutes, three giant birds appear on the horizon in formation, like bombers.
“There they are,” says Stockton excitedly, reaching for binoculars and struggling to identify the birds gliding far overhead. Although he cannot tell which birds these are, he recounts his favorite birds’ personalities as if they were family members.
“R-8 is the prettiest. She’s always been my special bird,” he says.
“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 of tag they wear--R for red, for example--and the number relates to their birth sequence. The technical names are also 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, whereas 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 as a result of run-ins with both. Five of the 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, trading observations with his partner and soaking up the peaceful ambience of life far from suburban congestion. He fixes some 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, he 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, they returned to Oregon, where Mike Stockton applied for environmental jobs. The condor recovery program was his first choice; he was offered a job more than two years ago.
“This is the kind of thing I always wanted to do as a kid,” he says, mentioning childhood fantasies of becoming a forest ranger. He said the only way he would have moved to Southern California was for a job far from overdevelopment and choking traffic.
“If you’re used to the fast lane, this is not the job for you,” he says.
But it is a job for someone who doesn’t mind dirt and dead animals, enjoys spending long hours alone and thinks nothing of sitting in a stifling tent with binoculars, jotting down every rip the condors make in a piece of carrion.
The condor recovery program has a steady supply of employees with such interests. Because of limited staffing, the program heavily relies on volunteers--mostly people passionate about preserving the condor--to supplement its paid staff.
In 1987, with only 27 of the birds left in North America, the California condor became a symbol of the environmental destruction humans were inflicting on the planet. The bird’s native terrain was being eaten away by development, and its food supply no longer freely roamed the region.
The remaining condors were brought into captivity to breed. Now it costs about $1 million a year to monitor and protect the bird, with most of the funds coming from the federal government.
Although some critics consider the cost excessive, Stockton, who makes about $30,000 a year, and his co-workers see the program’s cost as a drop in the bucket for a worthwhile cause. It is nowhere near the annual salary of a major league baseball player or the cost of a bomber, they say, and the program is saving a genus from extinction.
Stockton doesn’t expect to be in his job for more than five years.
“Biologists like to move around and get their hands on new types of animals,” he says.
Eventually, he hopes to go back to Oregon or move to Northern California, probably working in another government job.
Although Stockton said he loves his work, one of the trying aspects is the small amount of time he gets to spend with his wife. Because of his 10-days-on, four-days-off schedule, their time together is scarce.
Denise Stockton is working on a degree in studio art at UC Santa Barbara. Her husband said his absence lets her focus on her studies.
Condor program employees earn about two weeks of vacation each year.
“This would not work if we were trying to raise a family,” he says.
But they have already done that, and now he has settled into a life lived mainly in the wilderness.
On a recent day, Stockton wakes with the sun, trudges up a steep hill with a heavy backpack and folds himself into a rickety chair inside a small tent--surrounded by equipment in what would become 90-degree heat--to await the condors’ arrival at the small heap of dead animals a few hundred yards away.
He waits and waits.
Throughout the day, a total of seven birds arrive. But Stockton would spend the next three days in that tent if that is how long it took for all the birds to eventually show up and feed.
“I love these birds,” he says.
