by Ian Harding
These were all excellent birds, but they weren’t the one I was here for.
None of them were condors.
The trail led us past a small group of rock climbers resting on their crash mats and up to the mouth of a cave. A sign in front of the cave advised us that flashlights were required for entry. I turned on my headlamp and stepped inside.
These caves were not what you might ordinarily think of when you hear the word “cave.” There were no stalactites or stalagmites, no glowing insects or crazy deformed cave slugs. The tunnels were created by a series of boulders that were rolled up on top of one another. It looked like the aftermath of a snowball fight between giants, and walking through the caves felt like exploring the underbelly of a rockslide. Light broke through the stones at odd angles and zigzagged its way down to us in faint bursts, giving hints of color to the moss that covered the ground at our feet. It was cooler in here as well.
The rangers were right to put up that flashlight sign. At times, the boulders clustered together pretty tightly, and Walter and I were plunged into total darkness. The path in front of us got narrower and narrower as it got harder to see. I tightened the strap on my headlamp and looked back to make sure Walter was doing all right. He was about ten paces behind me, his flashlight still packed away in his bag.
“Aren’t you going to turn your light on?” I asked.
He laughed. “I can see just fine without it.”
Moments later, I heard a thud behind me. “Ow,” Walter muttered, and then he turned his light on.
The caves sloped up, and suddenly the tunnel was flooded with light. As we stepped out, we realized that we were now on top of the boulder field. We jogged up a couple of flights of stone steps and found ourselves looking out over a reservoir. A thin grove of trees lined the edge of the water at intervals on the far shore. A snake swam lazily across the water’s surface, its black-and-yellow-striped body glistening in the midday sun.
The reservoir was pretty small: Walter pointed out that it was roughly the size of an Olympic pool.
The Olympics were going on in Rio that week. It was all over the news. And for some reason, hearing the word “Olympic”—thinking about sports, about competition and medals—got me thinking about the audition I’d just had again.
Most Olympic sports have clear winners. The criteria for success in a foot race is purely objective. There are no extra points for style, haircut, or music choice. You are the best if and only if you have the best time or the most points. It’s simple. There’s something comforting about that kind of objectivity.
Acting is the exact opposite. It is purely subjective. Despite the awards given out every year, there are no clear and universally accepted ways to determine what makes one actor better than another. You go into an audition, and you worry about being a good actor, about portraying the role as honestly and compellingly as possible. But you worry about your acting because it is the only thing you have any control over.
A host of other factors can determine whether or not you get the role, and there’s nothing you can do about them. Casting often depends on your social media following, on what producers you know, whether or not your previous films made money, whether or not you’ve been in the news lately, what kind of relationship your agents have with the casting office. And so on.
Just after college I met a casting director at a house party in LA. After we’d introduced ourselves, I asked him to tell me about his job. I wanted to know how hard it was to figure out who the best actor in the room was.
He laughed. “If all I had to do was say who the best actor in the room was, anybody could do my job,” he said. “Also, I’d get to go home a hell of a lot earlier at night.”
Maybe that’s what we like so much about Olympic sports: when there are objective winners and losers, life feels a whole lot simpler and fairer. We can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether or not Meryl Streep is the greatest living actor, citing opinions and personal preference, but the whole world agrees that Usain Bolt is the greatest living sprinter because, well, math. It’s a rare and fascinating experience to have the entire world agree about something. How often do you get to see that?
Walter tapped me on my shoulder and broke me out of my daydreaming. “What’s that over there?” he asked, pointing at a speck in the sky.
I looked up. It was definitely a bird. And it was big. Really big. Possibly even condor big. Reminding myself not to get too excited, I clutched my binoculars and lifted them to my face to get a closer look.
It was a golden eagle.
Son of a bitch.
Don’t get me wrong, this was a pretty cool thing to see. It was, in fact, my first time ever seeing a golden eagle. By all accounts, I should have been dancing with joy.
But it wasn’t a condor, and so I saved my dancing for later. It’s bizarre seeing a bird you’ve always wanted to see and feeling disappointed by it. I felt bird-spoiled. Like the kid who gets a car for their sixteenth birthday but gets mad because it isn’t an Audi.
Seeing the eagle meant that we were high enough up the mountain to start looking for condors, so we scanned the horizon with our binoculars as we walked along the water’s edge. We had to be careful not to get tricked by any turkey vultures. Turkey vultures often get mistaken for condors, and condors often get mistaken for small planes. We saw both turkey vultures and small planes flying over the reservoir that afternoon, but no condors.
After a few minutes of scanning the sky to no avail, we heard footsteps on the trail behind us. We put our binoculars down and turned to see a couple in their thirties coming up the path. From the way they waved and greeted us it seemed like they wanted to stop and chat for a bit.
Walter and I introduced ourselves. It turned out the couple was visiting from Germany—the woman was in town for a scientific entrepreneurship conference, and her husband was tagging along for fun. He had a camera with him, and he was taking pictures of everything. He showed us some of his favorites from the day: pretty leaves, oddly shaped rocks, the sweaty T-shirt of a man they’d passed on the trail. He was a photo nut.
“You know, if you’re looking for cool things to photograph, we just saw a snake swimming in the reservoir over there,” I said, pointing to where we’d seen it a few minutes before.
The man let out an excited yip, grabbed his camera bag, and set off jogging toward the water. His wife looked down and noticed that Walter and I were wearing binoculars.
“Oh!” she said. “Are you two here to see the condor?”
We nodded.
“Have you seen it?” she asked.
“No, no luck yet,” I said. “We were thinking we might have to hike up to the top to get a look at them.”
She smiled and wished us luck. Apparently they had come to the park with the same goal. As we spoke, her husband came back, a little winded but happy. He’d gotten a good shot of the snake, he said.
Walter and I resumed our hike. As we said goodbye, the German couple was sitting down on a boulder so that the husband could show his wife his snake photos.
We left the Moses Spring Trail and got onto the High Peaks Trail, which would take us up to the summit. The sky was cloudless that day, just a wash of blue with blinding sunlight in the west. We hiked along, spotting birds as we went.
Birding up in the mountains, especially on a day like that, can be difficult. You’re staring intently at a tiny black spot set against a sea of blue, and your eyes keep going out of focus, because, naturally, they want to avoid staring directly up at the sun for too long. It’s tough to differentiate any clear markings when it’s that sunny out and everything you’re looking at is hundreds of yards away. If you’re not careful, hope and blurred vision can mess with your head—you become convinced that a tiny black dot in the sky is something special, even though you have absolutely no evidence to support it.
The trail sloped upward and broke into a series of switchbacks, cutting its way up the mountainside. As we trudged our way along the
second switchback, a merlin flew over our heads. A merlin—aside from being the name of a badass wizard who aged in reverse—is a neat little falcon. Back in medieval times, merlins were the official bird of choice for noblewomen. They called them “lady hawks,” and they used them to hunt skylarks.
The switchbacks were getting steeper and steeper. We decided to take a quick break and rehydrate a little. As Walter and I shuffled along looking for a nice spot to sit, we spotted the German couple again—and they were in front of us? When we’d left them, they’d been sitting on a boulder, looking at pictures, and somehow they’d beaten us up the mountain to where we now saw them, also sitting on a boulder and looking at pictures.
They were like lazy teleporters.
When they saw us, they both waved enthusiastically and beckoned us over.
“How—how did you get in front of us?” I asked, still panting from the trek up.
My question seemed to be lost in translation. The wife smiled and shrugged. “Ja, you know,” she said, then nudged her husband. “Show them the photo. We saw the condor!”
We were shocked. “Here?” Walter asked. I looked up at the sky. Nothing. Just blue as far as the eye could see.
“Ja,” the husband said, cycling through the photos on his screen to find the picture.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“White on the wings, ja?” he said, his nose still buried in his camera.
Walter couldn’t believe it. “Yeah!” he said. “Yeah, white on the wings.”
The California condor has an unmistakable strip of pure white shooting across the underside of each of its wings.
“Aha!” the husband cried, finding the photo and handing the camera to us.
On the screen was a perfectly clear, crisp, beautifully captured photo of a turkey vulture.
“See the white?” he said, pointing at the tips of the vulture’s wings. They were indeed pale—a light, silvery gray that verged on white—but nothing like the shocking white strip on a condor’s wings.
This was awkward. Walter gave me a look. We had a heartbreaking decision to make. Did we tell him the truth, or did we let him go home, thinking he’d seen a condor when in fact he hadn’t? Maybe a friend from home would tell him the truth about the bird. Maybe not; maybe he’d never find out. Maybe he’d always believe that he’d seen a condor. He’d go to his grave with that beautiful, happy lie.
I’ve heard birding described as the last bastion of honesty. We don’t have big competitions, rivalries, or races. There is no world’s greatest birder. There’s no way for us to measure or rate success like you do in sports. If somebody says they’ve seen a bird, there’s no real way to confirm or deny that they saw what they say they did unless they took a picture. The birding community as a whole depends on message boards run by enthusiasts from every corner of the earth. The honor code is all we have.
Most of the time, when you’re out birding, it’s just you and yourself, and if you can’t be honest with yourself, what’s the point? Birding cannot exist without honesty.
We decided to tell the Germans that they hadn’t actually seen a condor, that it had just been a turkey vulture.
They were crestfallen. We felt terrible. The wife whispered to me, “Ah, you shouldn’t have told us.” Meanwhile, the husband began to scroll through his camera, showing us all the photos he had taken of the vulture, trying to prove to us that it had, in fact, been a condor.
We felt bad and decided to get out of there. Walter led the way as we resumed hiking up the switchbacks, and we were quickly out of sight of the Germans.
As we hiked on, I kept glancing up at the sky. Turkey vultures circled overheard, but definitely no condors up there. Not yet, at least. Walter was looking up, too. “I wish we could find some rangers,” he said. “They could probably tell us where to look.”
As he spoke, we rounded a corner and found ourselves face-to-face with a park ranger. Walter practically ran into him. I think we may have seemed a bit too excited.
“You guys okay?” he said.
“Totally. We’re hoping to get a look at some of the condors today. Has anyone reported any sightings of them today?”
He shook his head. “Not my area, guys. You’d have to ask Condor Crew.”
“Condor Crew?” Walter asked.
“Yeah,” he said, offering no other explanation. “They’d be the ones to ask.” Apparently this ranger was not going to be the solution to all of our condor problems.
We walked on. I never did find out what Condor Crew was.
Eventually, the switchbacks ended and we found ourselves on top of the mountain, surrounded by the pinnacles themselves. Pinnacles National Park is named for the sharp, pointy crags that line the top of its tallest mountain, jutting out at all angles like a mouth full of rotten teeth. Despite that description, they are a gorgeous sight, and there are no trees at that altitude, so standing among them you can see for miles in every direction.
We scrambled across the pinnacles and found a nice spot to perch and look out with our binoculars. There were vultures everywhere. I kept thinking each and every one of them was a condor. I can see how the German couple had made that mistake. The two different species look so similar at a distance—they were all just specks in the sky. I kept feeling a small jolt of excitement at each new little black dot, but none of them were what I hoped they would be.
California condors weren’t always such a rarity in this part of the country. Hundreds of them once filled the sky. The land surrounding pinnacles is mostly agricultural, so pesticides took out a big percentage of the condor population, but that wasn’t the only factor in their decline.
Johnny Cash helped too.
He had a ranch up in Ventura County, and he used to throw sloppy, debaucherous parties up there. Then in the mid-1960s, Cash got really into party buses. He would drive them out onto his property, hook up rows and rows of speakers, and blare out Christmas music as loud as he could into the mountains around him. But then one time his party bus overheated, and he set fire to the entire Las Casitas National Forest. The fire spread across three mountains, and hundreds of acres went up in flame.
At the time of the fire, the area was home to fifty-three California condors. Supposedly, Johnny Cash killed forty-nine of them.
When asked about the fire, he was decidedly unapologetic, telling a judge, “I don’t care about you or your damn yellow buzzards.”
I don’t think Johnny Cash and I would have liked each other.
Up in the sky, a single bird was flying off toward the horizon. It was just a speck, but it was a massive speck—much bigger than the buzzards circling nearby. I pulled out my binoculars. In the lenses, I could make out its wide black wings. But I couldn’t see anything else. It was too far away.
I asked Walter, “Do you think that was it?”
He shrugged. He’d seen the bird, too, but neither of us could get a good enough look to ID it. If it was a turkey vulture, it was the biggest turkey vulture I’d ever seen. But I couldn’t be positive that it wasn’t.
I was defiant. It must have been a condor. What else could it have been?
I sat down and took out my bird journal. When I first started birding, I hated the idea of keeping a “life list.” It felt like I was collecting birds. I thought that keeping track of them—writing down what I’d seen and where—would somehow cheapen the experience. I worried that I was making my hobby competitive. I had this image in my head of two birders comparing life lists, and one of them walking away as the “winner.”
I’ve since come around to the practice, though. A life list is my own personal diary of what I’ve seen—and it wouldn’t be worth anything to anyone else. Also, I have a terrible memory, so I need it.
I opened the book to the first available page and wrote down the date. After the date, I wrote “California condor” and then, to the right of that …
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say for certain that I’d actually seen it. I would never really k
now for sure, and it wasn’t something I was willing to lie about. The honor code really sucks sometimes.
I scribbled “Better view needed” into the margin next to the condor’s name and closed my book.
Walter squinted at the sun. It was lower now. It would be dark in a couple of hours, and we still needed to set our tents up down below.
As we began our descent, we saw the German couple appear again just over the ridge of the pinnacles. I considered waving goodbye, but they hadn’t seen us yet, and I was worried they might still be upset about the turkey vulture. I didn’t want to rub salt in the wound. I hope that the Germans had better luck with the condors than we did.
We walked down flights of steps that had been jackhammered into the mountainside by some brave construction crew. The trail home was faster—going downhill usually is. We passed a rock on our right that was absolutely covered in turkey vultures. They eyed us interestedly as we walked by—waiting to eat us in case we didn’t make it down the mountain.
“Good ol’ Mount Turkey Vulture,” Walter said. I scowled. Up by the pinnacles, so many vultures had disappointed me when I’d mistaken them for condors. There was a smug, almost mocking, look on their bald, ugly faces.
If I can stick with the metaphor of condors being a stand-in for big acting roles, then turkey vultures are like auditions. Every time you see one, you think, “Oh my God, this could be it. This could be the big one.”
But more often than not what you’re seeing isn’t a condor at all. It’s just a big ol’ turkey vulture.
We hiked on in silence for about half an hour. From time to time, a sparrow or a towhee would fly by us, but we weren’t really paying much attention to the little stuff at that point. We were tired and hungry, and dinner and sleep were calling.
Near the end of the hike, I heard a light rustling of wings. An American kestrel came cruising along the side of the slope we were walking along. It landed in a tree a short distance in front of us.
I wouldn’t say I have a favorite bird, but kestrels are definitely up there. They’re hands-down the coolest.