Welcome to Ann Torrence photography - U.S. Highway 89, landscape, nature, people from Utah, the west, rural western U.S., national parks and international locations. Ann is writer of photography tips and and travel stories and essays. Photographer of U.S. 89: Character of the American West

The Day of the Condors

California Condors were reintroduced to the Grand Canyon ecosystem after a controversial captive breeding program attempted to rescue the species from extinction. This passage is from Highway 89: the Character of the American West.

Condor #41 at the south rim of Grand Canyon National Park

Rafting guide John Toner, a veteran of 97 descents of the Grand Canyon, was piloting another expedition when he saw a condor in 1998. Soaring 1,000' above the river, the huge size and flight pattern indicated it was a bird he had never seen before. He grabbed his binoculars to confirm the identification, the first he'd seen in the three years since the raptors had been reintroduced to the wild.

Condors are known to hang out near the release site beneath the Vermillion Cliffs and even to roost in Marble Canyon near the highway bridge, but they aren't always easy to find.

One December day, a snowstorm was clearing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Wisps of clouds formed below the rim and dissipated as the air currents wafted them out of the canyon. Ravens were on the move. The often solitary birds flew by in ragged flocks, then landed just below the rim to pick through the snow on the talus. One flock numbered over two hundred ravens, but no condors soared that day.

As the sun heats the south-facing walls of the canyon, convective winds provide lift that raptors use to efficiently cover vast feeding territories. Unlike songbirds, larger raptors roost until the thermals develop, often late in the morning. When they launch, they spiral upward on a rising current, then descend in a shallow glide to search for prey, carrion, or another thermal. The preferred condor strategy fails if the weather doesn't cooperate, like one spring morning when a weather system had settled cold air on the Colorado Plateau. Circling only feet above the landmark El Tovar Hotel were five condors--the birds couldn't find a thermal in the cold air.

On the esplanade between the hotel and the canyon edge trail, condors zoomed by like jets on patrol, some below in the canyon, others barely clearing the trees as they searched for rising air. They cruised by for hours, often passing so close that their numbers on their shoulder tags could be read.

A strolling mendicant naturalist of a ranger, who could have been the ghost of John Muir except for his uniform, told visitors that a condor pair had hatched an egg below Maricopa point, along Hermits Rest Drive. Condors flew past the Corn Pollen Dancers as they performed outside the Hope House. Not until mid-afternoon did the air warm up enough to build up thermals, and about that time the condors vanished for the day.

Some scientists describe condors as a living relic of the age of gigantic mammals, evolved as carrion feeders of mastodons and giant sloths. As their diet shifted to elk and other game, the condors were reduced to perhaps a few hundred individuals by the time the arriving European settlers (prejudiced against the vulture on principal) started shooting them indiscriminately. Some prospectors even used their quills as containers for gold dust. The El Tovar portico bears an inscription above the hotel entry, "Dreams of Mountains as in their sleep, they brood on things eternal". Even if mountains were eternal, the condors are not. Only because of an unprecedented decision to take the last of the wild population into a captive breeding program are the condors flying over the Grand Canyon today. It is fool's errand perhaps, in evolutionary time scales, but why not? That first sight of a condor rising out of the void of the Grand Canyon can be a gift to the park's visitors for as long as possible.

Yavapai Point, Grand Canyon National Park