on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Fixing the World

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service awarded the tribe a $200,000 grant to do the feasibility study, and the tribe is working with many other collaborators, including Redwood National and State Parks, several universities, Six Rivers National Forest, the U.S. Geological Survey, condor breeding programs in California and Oregon, and private landowners.

But it was the Yuroks’ idea.

“It’s written in the Yurok constitution, and it’s always been one of our goals, to have restoration of Yurok ancestral territory — the landscape, the animals — to what it was pre-contact with Europeans,” said Williams.

Toward that end, the tribe is nearing closure on a deal to buy 47,000 acres from Green Diamond Resources Co. Right now, the tribe’s reservation is but a two-mile-wide ribbon of land, through which the Klamath River flows, that descends from Weitchpec down to the ocean.

A few years back, said Williams, some elders were discussing what creature they wanted the wildlife program to restore first once they had more land. Some said, let’s do the salmon — but another department was already taking care of salmon. Someone else said sturgeon — but, same story as the salmon. And then someone — Williams doesn’t know who — said, how about the condor?

It made sense. Cathartidae — the taxonomic family the condor, like the smaller turkey vulture, belongs to — means purifier. Vultures clean the world. And the condor is the biggest vulture.

*Gymnogyps californianus* nearly went extinct. In 1987, when the last wild California condor was brought into captivity, there were just 22 of them left in the world, all in California, all now captive. A controversial, laborious captive breeding program over the ensuing 20 years coaxed the California condor slowly out of the ghostland. As of this June, there were 358 in existence, 189 of them living in the wild, including some wild-hatched chicks. About half the wild ones live in California, the rest in the Grand Canyon region and in Baja Mexico.

Williams and West have to find out if the things that pushed the California condor over the edge, and still pose a threat today, are in high concentrations in this region: lead bullets and DDT, but also other toxins, like mercury. First, they’re collecting the blubber of marine mammals — potential condor food — to measure exposure to DDT.

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