The condors of Marble Canyon
Images from a serendipitous encounter
On Wednesday morning I woke up in Holbrook and, before leaving, did a little tour around the high desert crossroads town, awed by the weirdness of it all. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Holbrook, with its Bucket of Blood Street, grinning plastic dinosaurs, and mid-century kitsch, is truly unique, the product of the interstate, railroad, and Route 66 running through the nearest community to Petrified Forest National Park.
I headed west, doing my best to avoid driving on I-40. This led me to no fewer than three dead ends, forcing me to backtrack. But it also took me down some cool, if defunct, segments of Route 66, and almost got me creamed by a big rig hauling coal ash from the Cholla power plant, which looms over the sere landscape. After touring Joseph City and Winslow, I veered away from the Little Colorado River and headed southward across the Navajo Nation, up to Hopi, past the wintering corn fields at Moenkopi, and through Tuba City before continuing south on Hwy. 89.
Whenever I’m in this part of Arizona, I try to get to Navajo Bridge (which is actually a pair of bridges), which spans Marble Canyon and the Colorado River downstream from Lees Ferry. One of the bridges was built in 1929, and is now for pedestrians, the other in 1993. They resemble the bridge that crosses the Colorado just below Glen Canyon Dam. I like to go out on the dam-bridge, too, but I also find it a bit frightening: the dam exudes an aura of, for lack of a better term, ominous violence. The Navajo Bridge, by contrast, is a place of serenity. You can stand out on it and, unimpeded by chain link fences, look straight down on the deep, murky green, slow-moving waters of the Colorado and do a bit of vertiginous meditation.
The light was crisp, almost harsh, on this visit, and the parking lot almost empty. I got out of the Silver Bullet, stretched, and ambled toward the bridge, noticing as I did a trio looking intently downriver through binoculars. It appeared as if they were studying the engineering of the automobile bridge, and I wondered if maybe it were cracking and getting ready to fail catastrophically. I readied my camera, just in case, and followed their gaze. That’s when I saw them: a trio of giant birds perched on the steel beams of the bridge, some 470 feet above the river, doing a bit of meditating of their own (or perhaps waiting for carrion to float by).
The magnificent creatures, their pink bald heads jutting out from brown-feathered bodies, are California condors, some perhaps the descendants of six birds released in the area in 1996, others that were introduced in later years. They are huge — sporting up to ten-foot wingspans — but live a fragile existence. After being driven nearly to extinction, federal wildlife officials began rearing California condors in captivity and reintroducing them throughout the West. Now there are more than 500 California condors in the wild, but humans continue to imperil them.
Perhaps the greatest threat is lead poisoning, which comes from ingesting carrion contaminated by lead ammunition. Lead ammunition is designed to shatter and fragment when it hits an animal, increasing its lethality. These fragments end up in the animal’s flesh and the guts, which hunters often discard in the field to be eaten by scavengers. This fall a condor in Zion died from lead poisoning, and wildlife officials say nearly every condor they test has some level of lead in its bloodstream.
Federal and state-level efforts to ban the use of lead ammunition for hunting have run into strong resistance from gun rights advocates, who claim (erroneously) that the initiatives are aimed at stopping all hunting. So some states, including Arizona and Utah, have implemented voluntary programs that incentivize hunters to use non-lead ammunition and dispose of gut piles in a scavenger-safe way. In 2019, California prohibited the use of lead ammo for hunting, but did not ban the sale of the ammunition.
I spent a good part of the afternoon mesmerized by the birds, hoping they would spot something dead and rotting and delicious so I could witness one in flight. It didn’t happen, but I consider myself fortunate nonetheless: As I was preparing to leave I looked straight down from my place on the bridge for one last glimpse at the mighty Colorado, all emerald green down below, and there, only about ten feet below me, sat a young condor, pink beak protruding from a fuzz of black feathers.
I live near the World Center for Birds of Prey. I have a poster I bought in 1982 from the San Diego Wild Animal Park when I was a student at UCSD on my wall at home that says, "Save the California Condor," beside a Serena Supplee print that shows two condors flying above the cliffs. Thanks for sharing your incredible good luck to see these birds. I hope I see one someday in the wild. I was born in 1959 and at age 9 I read about all the incredible animals that went extinct in the Pleistocene, and I mourned their loss. Ever since, I have been somewhat of a misanthrope. In 1969, at age 10, my parents bought me a subscription to National Wildlife magazine. That's when I read an article about lead shot...how lead in the water from pellets and sinkers poisons ducks and fish. And how banning lead, and using steel shot instead, would stop that. And it was so obvious to me: we must outlaw lead ammunition. It's lethal to all animals on this planet. And every year that didn't happen, I became more convinced that humans are really, really dumb. In Idaho a few years ago a proposition passed that made it unconstitutional to outlaw lead ammo in this state. Aldo Leopold said: "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."
They are such incredible creatures. It's sad to me that most humans prioritize their selfish needs over the rest of the world. We truly are a scourge on this planet. Thank you for always providing a light on these important topics.