on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Fixing the World

If the condor comes back to Yurok country, maybe the country will come back for everyone

(July 16, 2009)  A couple of hours past noon the turkey vulture rode a current from the northwest into the blue space above the Bald Hills, east of Orick. It soared, black-and-gray wings fixed in a teetery V, up over a grass-yellow pointy hill topped with trees and out over a broad ridgetop prairie dense with tall grass, dandelions and low tufts of dark brackenfern. The past few days, there’d been food down there: dead bear. The smell had been enough to draw the keen-nosed bird in, and the black furry heap a confirmation.

Another turkey vulture soared over the horizon into the blue above the hills, and another and another. A meadowlark trilled, liquid, from somewhere deep in the grass where the flattish ridgetop began to slope down toward more sets of rolling grass hills mingled with oak woodland.

The California condor has a wingspan up to 10 feet, can weigh up to 23 pounds and grow as long as five and a half feet. Its lifespan in the wild is unknown — maybe 60 years. Photo by Chris West

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There was a whiff of something. But instead of circling down to investigate, the vultures stayed high, made a few distant tilting sweeps, and sailed on. People were down there today.

Tiana Williams saw the vulture soar into view and pointed it out to Chris West. When the other vultures came in and swirled briefly above the close hills, Williams and West revived their latest running joke: that the turkey vultures know them.

“We leave carcasses everywhere,” West said. “And turkey vultures can’t open up carcasses. A condor can. But the turkey vulture’s beak isn’t strong enough. And here we go out to seal and sea lion carcasses and open ‘em up. And the turkey vultures go, ‘Oh great! The people with the knives showed up!’”

They’d not only been knifing open dead marine mammals down on the beaches. West and Williams also had been leaving fresh carrion on this flat ridgetop. But today there was just a small remnant of a black bear they’d left days ago — a shaggy leg with clawed paw still attached and in the flattened grass nearby a dried twist of something, maybe entrail. The bear carcass had been donated to West and Williams from a dissection lab at Humboldt State University.

Now they were slowly erecting a net-draped rectangular cube around the bear scraps: four panels made of PVC pipe, each wrapped in strong black netting secured by hooks, clamped together and covered with an airy roof made of wood and wire. Part of the roof was ladderlike with rungs upon which, say, a turkey vulture could perch before dropping between rungs to feast on the carcass within, but through which it would be unable to lunge back out. West designed the contraption, modeling it after one he’d used belonging to U.C. Davis researchers. His is lighter and can be assembled on the spot, making transport into the backcountry easier. And, yes, the trap is intended for turkey vultures — several could gather in it at once.

Williams and West are the sole employees of the Yurok Tribe’s fledgling wildlife program. West, a 38-year-old condor biologist, was hired by the tribe to head the program. Williams, a 23-year-old Yurok Tribe member, graduated from Harvard a couple of years ago with a biochemistry degree and an itch to get into wildlife management. Their first project is to explore what it would take to reintroduce the California condor to Yurok ancestral territory.

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