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Safe Passage: Condors Wing Back to Wild
Norton Early Defender Of Captive Breeding

By Michael Grunwald
Friday, April 6, 2001

In the mid-1980s, a young lawyer named Gale A. Norton started a job at the Interior Department, and landed right in the middle of a war over the California condor.

The majestic scavenger was on the brink of extinction, and Norton's bosses had decided to pull the last few birds out of the wild to breed in zoos. Environmentalists sued the Reagan administration, warning that condors would never survive in nature after they were all confined in cages. Norton helped defend the initiative, her first task at Interior.

Norton is now the interior secretary for the Bush administration, and yesterday near Big Sur, Calif., she presided over the release of five zoo-bred condors into the wild. It was the latest sign of success for the once-controversial captive breeding program, which has more than quintupled the imperiled condor population. Two weeks ago, a condor laid an egg in the wild for the first time in 15 years, and although it was cracked, even green groups that once derided captive breeding as a fast track to oblivion hailed the news as a major milestone.

The new Cabinet secretary has been excoriated by environmentalists for her conservatism, but in an interview this week she was careful not to gloat about the condors, saying she understood the emotions of critics who had wanted them to keep flying free. She said the simple lesson of the expensive and intensive effort is that public-private partnerships with zoos and other wildlife groups can help endangered species recover, and that cooperation makes more sense than the conflicts she endured on the way to her confirmation.

"Just imagine what other success stories we could celebrate together if all groups put down their verbal swords and joined hands to save our most endangered species," she said yesterday in California.

Her old bosses, however, were not so restrained, recalling that some environmentalists had once proclaimed that for condors, "death with dignity" would be preferable to the prison of zoo life. Another lesson of the saga, said former assistant interior secretary William P. Horn, is that doomsaying environmental activists don't always know what's best for the environment.

"For all the beating up that Republican appointees get on these issues, in this case it turned out that our approach was exactly right," said Horn, who made the decision to capture the last wild condors when the overall population had plunged to 27. "The environmentalists are an interest group like every other interest group. They aren't infallible."

To be sure, some environmentalists supported the captive breeding program from the start, and Interior Department scientists were sharply divided about its merits. And while there are now 54 condors in the wild -- there were zero from 1987 to 1991 -- their mortality rate is still far too high. They die of lead poisoning after eating bullet-riddled carcasses. They fly into power lines. Two were killed by coyotes after roosting overnight on the ground, which is not advisable for a massive bird that can barely take off without a tail wind.

The released condors are still reliant on their human handlers, who monitor their behavior constantly, supply them food, and recapture them every year for physical checkups. They seem disturbingly unfazed by human proximity, invading campsites, harassing park visitors, even entering a house. And while it's normal for condors to break eggs on their first try, some skeptics say it's silly to get excited about the viability of wild condors before they even reproduce in the wild.

"Norton shouldn't count her condors before they hatch," said Mark Palmer of the Earth Island Institute, who chaired the Sierra Club's condor task force in the 1980s. "It's definitely too early for her to say, 'I told you so.' "

Still, Palmer acknowledged that captive breeding has worked better than he expected, and other environmentalists -- while not exactly admitting error -- praised its results so far.

Back in the Pleistocene era more than 10,000 years ago, these 20-pound vultures with 10-foot wing spans ranged across most of the North American continent, subsisting on the carcasses of mastodons, woolly mammoths and giant sloths. But in modern times, they have not mixed well with people, who have shot them for sport and quills, and have paved over their natural habitats. At the moment Norton started work in the Interior Department solicitor's office, it looked as if California condors were about to vanish from the planet forever; she remembers near-constant updates about which particular birds were sick and which had died.

The Interior Department had already begun a limited captive breeding program when Norton arrived, but it faced a terrible new choice. Should it leave a few birds in the wild, where they were dying at an alarming rate, but where they could maintain natural traditions and serve as mentors to zoo-raised birds? Or should it capture them all, even though no one knew if captive birds would survive their eventual freedom?

Environmentalists also worried that if there were no condors in the wild, it would be much harder to make the case that their dwindling habitats should be protected. But in the end, Horn decided that the department could not risk the immediate extinction of an ancient species. And when the Audubon Society sued, Norton advised him to stand his ground.

"I certainly understand the feeling of those who were emotionally tied to the idea of wanting them to fly free; they're a terrific symbol of wild freedom . . . of the wild places of America," said Norton, who has infuriated green groups by supporting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and suspending the Clinton administration's last-minute restrictions on hard-rock mining. "But the idea of losing them without doing something to try to protect the species was ultimately something we decided we could not allow to happen."

Initially, there was skepticism about the program, reflected in headlines such as, "The Condor: Is Money Being Wasted on a Doomed Species?" and "The Last Days of the Wild Condor?" But the captive birds began producing chicks in 1988. The first condors were returned to the wild in 1992. They started finding their own food in 1995. There are now two distinct populations in the wild: one in California, one in Arizona. The California birds have begun dining on dead sea lions, the first condors to enjoy seafood in decades.

Still, no one pretends that these condors are entirely wild. Their handlers at the Peregrine Fund in Boise and the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos raise many of the chicks, using condor-like puppets to prevent the young birds from bonding with people. The handlers then try to condition the birds to avoid dangers; for example, they have set up imitation power lines to give the chicks harmless electric shocks. They install transmitters to monitor the birds in the wild. When six Arizona condors died of lead poisoning last year, they recaptured the rest to clean their blood. When the handlers fear that condors are scavenging a lead-tainted carcass, they take it away and provide a replacement meal.

Slowly, though, the condors are starting to adapt. Some have been frequenting the same drinking, foraging and nesting grounds as their predecessors. And the program's supporters are ecstatic about the egg spotted near the Grand Canyon last month by a Peregrine Fund biologist. The federal government spends $1 million a year to save the condor; private groups may be spending as much as $3 million more. The broken egg was a tangible symbol of progress.

"We're making tremendous headway," said Bruce Palmer, the condor recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "These birds are starting to act like real condors."

Norton thinks the potential recovery of the condor would be a shining (albeit pricey) example of how to protect species without inconveniencing people or destroying livelihoods. Some environmentalists remain angry that the government has not done more to protect the condor's habitat from development, but Norton points out that since the birds can fly 150 miles in a day, it's probably too late to turn all of California into a condor sanctuary.

"Some folks have a knee-jerk reaction: Save habitat no matter who suffers," said former Interior Department solicitor Ralph Tarr, Norton's old boss. "The shrill voices aren't always right."

But to habitat-minded enviros such as Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, the condor is no shining example at all. The top threat to America's 1,200 endangered species is habitat loss, and Suckling does not want Americans to think that recovery is painless. That notion, he says, is one reason that only 13 endangered species have recovered so far.

"It's like we've decided that species protection can only work if it doesn't affect anyone," Suckling said. "That's really sad."