I Dreamt I was a Condor

1.

Soaring above the coastline, circling and circling, hoping to find some kind of grub, some carcass to get into is all I really remember. The soaring. Maybe I dreamt I was a condor's beak. That seems like a more visceral thing, doesn't it? The hooking razor sharpness tells us all we need to know about this Pleistocene relic.

The California Condor is that which I speak. This ancient scavenger once roamed the skies of the last major glaciation with impunity, back when the megafauna was plentiful and dying regularly. Many of the aboriginal California tribes have their own stories about the condor. The Wiyot believed the condor recreated mankind after the Above Old Man wiped us out with a flood. The Chumash believed the condor was originally white, but turned black by flying to close to fire. Images of condors adorn ancient cave paintings and bones have been found buried with folks.

You can imagine how many people have dreamed of being this great flying beast.

2.

We were driving home from the Salton Sea, taking a scenic route, and traveled through the Anza-Borrego State Park. It's a beautiful spot in a varied state; desert to one side and the coastal range on the other, a little mix of both nestled between bodies of water.

We stopped in at a place to look for books; Corrie got a kids book and I picked up Willie Boy, a story of the last great posse manhunt of the dying old west of 1909. We got to talking with the older ladies at the shop, and they handed us all sorts of newsletters about the park full of various odd and/or important info: when the wild-flowers bloom; how to track coyotes; brief history about the Basque settler Anza, one of the park's namesakes; and about the repatriation of the California condor. They had a picture.

Is that...is that what one of these famous giant birds looks like?

As a kid growing up in California in the 1980s, I remember the hubbub that was stirred when in 1987, the decision was made to remove the condor from the wild---they were down to something like 19 specimens---and start a captive breeding program in the hopes of returning these majestic bastards to their perch as an apex scavenger. If such a thing exists.

Later on that day, after making it home, we were unwinding after dinner and watched an instant queue documentary from Netflix on Big Sur. The condor was a star of that show as well, and the focus was on the reintroduced population's troubles on the coastal scene.

Again, is that what these birds look like? I guess so.

3.

You'd be upset too if you had a ball-sack for a chin:

Seriously, have you ever seen one of these guys up close like this before? I thought I had, but I'd imagine I would have remembered scrotum-chin bird.

4.

One of the issues facing the California condor is biological. One thing about being a Pleistocene relic is that, well, advances have come along in other species that compete with you for resources that may be prove to be favored in the current setup of nature.

In other, less confusing phrasing, turkey vultures are proving to be biologically superior at finding carrion. Granted, the girth of the condor---if they can find some food, they'll scare most everybody away (except, of course, a hungry golden eagle--badgers won't even scare them) gives it an occasional advantage, but it may be to little too late. And that's when the condor can find food.

California condors have no sense of smell. They search for carrion using their great eye sight. This probably works better in the less cloudy interior of the deserts when the dead animals were huge, or on sunny beach days when the whales were plentiful, dying regularly and washing up onshore. Turkey vultures, on the other hand, can smell molecules of carrion from miles away.

Chalk that battle up to the turkey vulture.

5.

I remember these birds as being just huge, simply gigantic, the biggest birds on the planet.

Well, not really. That's one of those growing-up-in-80s-California false notions I developed.

Obviously there are the flightless birds: ostrich, emus, cassowaries, and penguins being the most famous editions. I had to look up cassowaries. If you can imagine a kiwi bird, that's like the smallest type of cassowary; the biggest ones are heavier than emus but shorter than the ostrich. Without flying, these large birds were able to develop great sizes, and even dense, marrow filled bones.

Okay, so, what about flying birds, right? The condor's wingspan is one of the biggest, clocking in at close to ten feet, and they're pretty fat too, weighing in at an average of 26 pounds.

It turns out there are some flying giants out there. The Dalmatian pelican is the heaviest on average bird that flies, something like 40 pounds, with a wingspan of 10 to 11 feet. Then there's the trumpeter swan. This is generally considered the biggest flying bird. It's six feet long, averages in the upper 30s in pounds, and has a 10 foot wingspan. There was a reported trumpeter that weighed fifty pounds and couldn't fly.

Wingspan wise the biggest is the wandering albatross. These guys look like sea gulls to me, but probably because I've never seen one up close. They have 12 foot wings. Twelve-fucking-feet.

Let's not forget the whooping crane. The whooper is the tallest flying bird, standing at a majestic five feet. (Soft spot for these birds from Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.)

So flightless birds, pelicans, swans, albatrosses, and the whooper all have some kind of claim to being slightly more giant in some way than our giant scavenger (with a scrotum as a facial feature), but one thing I found that seemed to top out in favor of this condor: age.

I couldn't find a bird with an average longer lifespan. Maybe a parrot? California condors live for an average of sixty years.

6.

Sixty years with a ball sack for a chin. And not even a mammoth to mack. Yeesh. See, even if you have a nut-sack on your face, if that face is buried in a mammoth, or a dead saber-toothed tiger, then your ass is dignified.

Yup, dignity comes to those who eat rotting mammoth and saber-tooth tiger corpses.

7.

Vultures are one of the three types of technical Birds of Prey.

I sometimes walk to the beach and watch the pelicans dive bomb fish. Yet they're not considered a Bird of Prey, with the capital letters of an official title. Ditto for penguins, who hunt fish nearly every day of their lives.

Official Birds of Prey are broken up into three groups, and scavenging vultures make up one. They developed from an early break with another group of surprise hunters. That seems to be the official criteria: swoop-surprise hunting.

The other two groups are the raptors and the owls.

Owls, raptors, and carrion vultures.

8.

Scoring one for the repatriation efforts: the condors are up over 400 specimens on the planet, I think it's at 419, with under 200 in captivity and over 200 wild. Strange fact: to be lifted from the "Critically Endangered" list to the plain "Endangered" list, which itself would be a coup of sorts, they just need to get to 450 birds.

Well, before us science types go congratulating ourselves, I should probably say that the baby condors growing up in captivity have a very hard time successfully scavenging on their own once repatriated, as they tend to be "taught" by their human overlords.

Also, maybe this animal's design is a relic for a reason, and the fact its time of this rock is limited is not necessarily a tragedy as much as an essential characteristic.

9.

After the Big Sur documentary ended and Corrie went to bed, I started doing some research on condors. Thinking about them for a few solid hours, and then once asleep, playing around in the quantum dream land, I was freed from the shackles terrestrial travel, and soaring above the coast.

The sky above was blue, and the crashing waves below were quiet at that height, their salty violence betrayed by the altitude. Around and around I circled, and soon I think I realized I might have been just the beak.

The sharp and powerful beak of a Pleistocene relic...

I Dreamt I was a Condor's Beak