Condor games

In elementary school they made boys play my least-favorite-except-dodgeball game. It consisted of everyone chasing after whoever had the ball, trying to mug them so that everyone could then violate the new ball-carrier. I was mortified by the aggression of it more than afraid of the assaults, as I made only transparently symbolic attempts to even catch the riot.

Over a decade later (December 2011) on a California mountain, I stepped out of a US government SUV to watch the world's largest flock of North America's biggest land birds playing this same game. The US Fish and Wildlife Service releases captive bred California Condors at Hopper Mountain Wildlife Refuge. Huge, ugly, smelly, fascinating, beautiful, precious birds, they are highly endangered and carefully managed. I was an intern on the Condor Recovery Program, and first thing every morning my assignment was to make sure we knew where they were. This morning I found them up Hopper Mountain with a Coke can. Condors, carrion eaters, are drawn to red, and prone to swallowing (and dying from) garbage. The Refuge is closed to the public, but trucks heading to oil wells in the mountains have to pass though, and we often found litter along those roads.

I radioed Mike Stockton, the flamboyant hippy cowboy biologist in charge. "Morning Mike, I'm looking at the whole flock standing on the road. They found a Coke can, and they all want it."

"You'd better just take it," was his only reply. "Roger that," I said, girding up.

This particular crumbling road, like many of those on the Refuge, had steep slopes up and down on either side. The condors, each four feet tall and armed with a beak that could disembowel a mastodon, were gathered at a bend in the road, a peninsula that ended in a cliff. Condors are too heavy to fly with anything in their beaks or feet, so R7, the dominant male, was cornered. Normally the whole flock was scared of him, but now his armament was full of Coke can. Several other condors charged him. He dropped it, jumped off, spread his ten foot wings and lifted skyward. He flew so close over my head I could almost taste his foulness, and could feel the heavy flapping of his wings. While I concentrated for a moment on not wetting myself, another condor grabbed the can and ran straight toward me. Fifteen birds, each incredibly important for this species' survival, each reeking of carrion and looking every bit like carnivorous dinosaur zombies prone to projectile vomiting, came running after the can and thereby towards me.

I took a step towards them and they stopped. I took a few more steps, and the lead bird, the one with the can, turned, ran right through the thicket of snapping beaks, and was back at the cliff's end, surrounded. I continued slowly forward.  A few more steps forward and most of the condors had jumped. Two more steps, the air filled with giant birds and their aroma, and it was just me and the condor with the can, still on the cliff's edge.

He hissed and flushed his face purple, trying to scare me off. "Boo!," I replied in kind, and he fled. Lunging after the can, I lay on my belly and examined my prize, a beat-up Coke can with one beak-tip-shaped bite snipped from its middle. I got to my feet, realizing I was now the one surrounded at cliff's end. I stuffed the can inside my jacket and tried to look fierce. We all stood there for a while. One condor after another stepped off the edge and floated into the morning sky. I finally won that god-awful game.