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Good intentions can't fool Mother Nature
By Carl Heintze
It seems to me the time has come for the California condor. I know this is heresy to the hundreds of environmentalists who, over the years, have expended millions of dollars and thousands of hours, trying to save the big, black, ungainly birds.
But no condors alive today are birds that bred in the wild. Either they are hatched in captivity and transplanted back into the hills, or they are descended from such birds.
And their numbers are few.
The condors who once soared gracefully over the dry hills of California are no more than a handful. Their numbers in the wild are few and far between. They circle rarely in the places where they once were plentiful.
Accomplishing this has taken years of careful tending, including feeding the newly hatched with hand puppets that pretend to be mothers and fathers of the chicks, and releasing fearfully the juvenile condors to places where they once roamed the skies.
The native condor range--although it is not really native to these transplanted creatures--is what might be called northern Southern California. But, alas, it is no longer the wild range that the ancestors of today's condors know.
Today's condors, of course, don't understand this, nor any of the other habitats that condor lovers favor. Man has moved in to occupy much of the space the condors once enjoyed, more or less, by themselves.
Condors are not especially bright anyway. They tend to mess up the chimneys and roofs of houses in the hills they once had to themselves.
And now they are in danger of flying into the whirling blades of windmill farms that have taken over some of the condor habitat.
Condors don't understand that the population of California is more than 33 million people and that those millions need electrical power more than they need condors. They have become sacrifices to "progress."
They are on their way to extinction. Indeed, without the care of those who love them, they would by now be gone.
Of course, to suggest this to those who love the condors is a waste of time. Those who love the condor are, to put it politely, firm in their belief that the California condor can and should be saved. Like those who want to reintroduce the wolf into Yellowstone Park, they are convinced that man, having decimated both condors and wolves, can somehow make it right with nature by bringing them back.
They hold to the belief that a "climax community"--one which is always in balance, which does not change--is possible. The unsettling factor in these and other climax communities, of course, is the very species which seeks to preserve them.
It is man who has tipped the balance of nature in the wrong direction by invading a place that mankind either never knew or knew only in small numbers. Thus, it was man who shot, poisoned and otherwise destroyed the California condor and his habitat. It was man who killed, and still kills, on occasion, the wolf.
But environmentalists believe somehow, that having broken Humpty Dumpty, they and all the king's men can put him, the condors, wolves and other marginal species back together again. I don't think so. Nature abhors a vacuum and always fills it.
Having said this, I would not want you to believe I am opposed to guarding and protecting all endangered species. Having made one set of mistakes with natural life, it is not necessary to make more.
But it seems to me that a species can reach a point where naturally it is no longer able to survive.
That appears to me to be what has happened to the condor. And it may be what has happened to the Yellowstone wolves.
The wolf may live on in Canada where man, as yet, does not intrude in the numbers with which he is loving Yellowstone to death, but it may be folly to believe wolves will be able to resist for very long the rifles of ranchers who think their cattle are being killed by the reintroduced animals.
But I don't expect this reality to make much impression on those who have tended the condor and who are seeking to re-establish the wolf.
Condor lovers recently announced their intention to seek renewed financial aid from the Bush administration. They want to spend additional millions to keep condors alive, breeding and being transplanted into the "wild."
There is a certain guilty satisfaction in this. It is as if, somehow, the sins of the past must be absolved by the efforts of the present, as if by nurturing and husbanding in captivity the few condors left, we may yet fool Mother Nature.
One would like to think this is true, that man can right the wrongs he has committed by seeking to rule the natural world.
But, it seems to me, alas, a belief fraught with doubt and, perhaps, with eventual failure.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
