"Dead Condors" is all about death; hence the title, and the whimsical name of this introductory section. To say that mortality killed condors seems like a play on words, and a statement of the obvious. It is both, of course, but I use it here not just as it applies to individual condors, but to the California condor population as a whole. Excessive, unnatural mortality played a far greater role in the decline of the California condor population than any other factor - in fact, probably greater than all other factors combined.

Habitat quantity and quality were never significant issues affecting survival of the California condor population. Certainly there were local losses (for example, grazing lands where condors once fed disappeared under housing tracts), and local degradations (once secluded nesting or roosting areas were overrun by recreational or commercial uses). Still, in 1980, when the condors' end seemed inevitable, there was plenty of good condor habitat remaining.

Productivity, of individual pairs and of the population as a whole, was also a minor issue compared to the mortality side of the ledger. It seemed to me that in the late 1970s - the last days of the original wild condor population - there were less new condors being reared than there should have been, given the size of the remaining population. However, if that really was the case, I think it was because excessive mortality had skewed sex, age, or distributional characteristics away from optimum, and some of the potential parent birds had been rendered ineffectual.

If all that had gone wrong for the condors over the years was the inevitable chipping away at their living space, I think we would still have a viable California condor population today. If the California condor population had not been subjected to over 150 years of extreme unnatural mortality, I think it is very likely the species would not have reached the point of near extinction that it did in fact reach 30 years ago. Here's why human-related mortality was so critical for the condors, when it was not for many other species.

California condors have a very low reproductive potential. Before the days of captive propagation and human manipulation of condor breeding habits, their ability to replace themselves was greatly limited. They had to stay alive at least six years before they bred for the first time - not long in human terms, but a long time for birds. For most condors, six years was likely the minimum age of first successful breeding; many probably required another year or so to find a mate and get good at all the techniques. Once nesting started, the annual clutch consisted of only one egg. If the egg successfully hatched, the young bird was normally in the care of the adults well into the year after it hatched, which meant most pairs had the potential to produce only one young bird every two years. Just to keep the population stable - for each pair to produce the two condors needed to eventually replace them - California condors had to stay alive for at least 10 years.

The good news through the 18th Century was that most condors probably did live at least ten years. They are a long-lived bird. We don't know what average longevity of wild birds was, but in captivity California condors have regularly lived 10, 20, 30, even occasionally over 40 years. Condors were seldom if ever killed by mammals or other birds (there are no reliable historical records, although some recent captive-reared condors have reportedly been killed by coyotes), which meant that most condors died of old age or accidents. To begin with, the California condor population apparently did have the resiliency to at least remain stable over long periods of time.

The bad news to this balance between low reproduction and long life is that it is easily upset. Ducks and quail live only a few years, but their reproductive potential is so high that their populations can usually maintain themselves through disastrous weather, major changes in predation, greatly increased hunting, or any number of other perturbations. The California condor population, on the other hand, was unequipped to respond to even the smallest changes in the balance between production and mortality. The first people to come in contact with condors likely started to shift the balance. Even the occasional condor taken for an Indian ritual, or the occasional condor shot by a curious 18th Century Spaniard, was probably enough to begin destabilizing the population. There followed in succession explorers and fur trappers with guns; gold seekers with guns; homesteaders, cattlemen and sheepmen with guns, poisons and traps; private specimen collectors and procurers of specimens for museums; and eventually just "civilization" with powerlines, pesticides, and other accompaniments of human population expansion. We'll never know how many California condors succumbed to human actions, but I've been able to document over 400 losses, most of them between 1840 and 1925. Excepting only those losses attributable to killing for private collections and museums (the majority of which are traceable), the known deaths from most causes probably represent only a small fraction of the actual mortality.

[NOTE: The effects of individual mortality factors are covered in detail in Chapters 3, 4 and 25 of my book "Condor Tales."]