A tourist descending the Kaibab Plateau toward Marble Canyon on Sept. 22 could have been forgiven for thinking there was a rock concert taking place somewhere down in the House Rock Valley, or maybe some sort of Colorado Plateau Burning Man knock-off, for the line of cars raising dust along the Wire Pass road was of a magnitude that had rarely, if ever, been seen in that remote place. Hundreds of cars were parked along both sides of the gravel road. Spectators toted camp chairs, coolers, dogs on leashes. Wide-brimmed hats were ubiquitous as protection against the sun. So were expensive optics: binoculars, spotting scopes.
There were indeed celebrities on site. They were tucked largely out of sight up on top of the Vermilion Cliffs, but that didn’t keep onlookers from trying to sneak a peek. Newbies who showed up were given instructions by the veterans who had been there 10 minutes or more.
“See that cliff where all the whitewash is? Go up and to the left from there. There’s a long dip with trees on it. The cage is over on the left side of the dip.”
The occasion was the annual condor release instituted by the Peregrine Fund, during which new captive-bred California condors are added to the growing population of wild individuals on the Colorado Plateau. And for these birds, the Vermilion Cliffs are home base.
The last wild condors disappeared from the plateau early in the 20th century, and the overall population dwindled to a total of only 26 by the late 1980s. There were serious discussions about simply allowing them to die out rather than to go through the indignities of captive breeding. But people instead chose a path that those who flocked to the House Rock Valley last month approved of: namely, an intensive effort to breed more condors in captivity, and to release them into the wild in central and Baja California, as well as in northern Arizona.
The first release in Arizona took place in 1996, on top of the Vermilion Cliffs. Chris Parish, the condor program director for the Peregrine Fund, was there, and at the release last month he remembered what it was like: “We were releasing six condors, and there were about six biologists there. It was nothing like what we’re seeing today.”
Parish is a big man who was wearing a checked shirt, straw hat and dark sunglasses along with his jeans and cowboy boots. With his streaming goatee, he looked like a cowboy. What he was saying came through surprisingly clearly on the solar-powered PA system.
Condors have been nesting each year in the Grand Canyon region, Parish said, and it was a testament to their resilience—to the resilience of place—that some of them have nested in exactly the same high cliff caves in which intrepid climbers have found ancient condor feathers, egg fragments and bones. By now, there were 85 condors flying Colorado Plateau skies, some of them roaming as far afield as Colorado and Wyoming. (As of last year 170 were living in California, and 38 in Baja California, with close to 200 in captivity in various zoos and captive breeding facilities.)
They find ample food in the form of the carcasses of deer, elk, cattle and pretty much any other animal large enough to warrant their attention. The main problem today, Parish said, is that many of the game animals they scavenge are killed by hunters who use lead ammunition. Remnants of lead remain in what hunters leave lying in the field, and scavengers, whether condors, eagles, ravens, coyotes or others, are cumulatively poisoned by the lead. As a result, the Peregrine Fund, Arizona Game and Fish Department and others have an active campaign going to encourage and subsidize the use of nontoxic ammunition instead of lead.
End of lesson. The excitement in the crowd was growing as the designated release time, 11 a.m., neared. The viewing site is about a mile from the base of the cliffs, and hundreds of pairs of eyes had already been trained up high, where large birds kept circling around the top of the cliffs. With binoculars, it was possible to see that the tiny speck birds were ravens. The bigger birds—without optics they were still pinpricks in the sky, but with binoculars it was obvious they were far bigger than the ravens—had wide flat wings ending in a spray of feathers like an outstretched hand; white shoulder patches; a squared-off tail.
It was hard to look away. It was almost impossible to look away. Even before the release, at least eight adult condors were flying around the top of the Vermilion Cliffs. They were rambunctious. Occasionally one landed on a high rock perch, almost knocking off another bird already perched there. It was as if they too felt the carnival atmosphere. Or maybe they were tantalized by the carrion with which the biologists had been feeding the newbies.
Some of the onlookers had come early and were sitting at a picnic table under a large shade structure—prime viewing real estate. Many had driven a long way. They were from Paonia, Colorado; from San Diego; from Prescott; from Cedar City. One family was from northern Utah but they’d evacuated temporarily to Kanab because of a wildfire near their hometown.
At 11 the countdown began—a little hokey, Parish allowed, but why not. It was a celebration, after all. When the count got to zero a biologist up on top of the cliffs cranked open the gate on the big cage. Young condors don’t always leave the cage quickly, we’d been warned, sometimes taking hours before working up the nerve to leave. But not these. Within a few seconds three of the captive-bred condors had catapulted themselves out into their new neighborhood and were flying around with the veterans.
The crowd greeted the newcomers with whoops and hollers and applause. It was hard to imagine what the condors up on the cliffs thought of the commotion below—maybe not much, because we after all were not dead yet and therefore weren’t likely to gain much attention from scavengers. But looking around at all the people who had traveled so far to get here, like the condors, it was comforting to think that maybe it was not one, but two species that were here experiencing the feeling of finding a new and lasting home.
