Read Online Condor by John Nielsen - Free Book Online Page A

that trailed behind the armored, sweating horsemen; these are the animals that saved the California condor from extinction by dominating Alta California for the next one hundred years at least.
    Alta California was God’s gift to the animals we call cows; almosteverything about the place seemed tailored to their needs. The grazing lands were endless, the weather was perfect, and the relevant diseases were mild. “The growth and development of the range livestock industry in the New World was a phenomenon without precedent,” wrote the cattle expert L. T. Burcham in the book California Range Land . It was the foundation of the domestic economy of Spanish California. 2
    Cows have been described as “the forward elements in the column of civilization,” but in California they were more than that. The line of missions laid out by Father Serra in the wake of this forced march to the north would not have survived for as long as it did but for these scrawny cows. And the condor would be extinct.
    These were not the kinds of animals a living soul would recognize as cows: they were not fat and square and uniformly healthy-looking and they did not live their lives in pens. They moved through landscapes never seen by Europeans, mowing down all the native grasses they could find. Most of these cows had long, skinny legs joined to narrow hips and badly swayed backs. Their heads have been described as “combatively coarse,” which probably means they were ugly.
    But if twitchiness and paranoia can be taken as a sign of animal intelligence, Spanish cows were very smart indeed. “These cattle had a quick, alert restless manner,” wrote an early student of the breed. “They have been likened to wild animals, continually sniffing the air for danger.”
    There was plenty to sniff for. Mountain lions stalked the cows that strayed from unfenced herds, waiting for the chance to leap onto their backs and rip their throats open. Lots of other wildcats tried to do the same.
    Then there were the grizzly bears. They were better at killing cows than all the other nonhuman predators combined, and of thehumans, only Spanish horsemen armed with rope knives matched the grizzly’s lethal speed and grace. Tracy Storer and Lloyd Tevis, authors of The California Grizzly , collected several written reports of grizzlies luring cattle in for the kill by lying on their backs in pastures and kicking their paws up in the air. When cows saw this playful scene, they came over to take a close look, and the grizzlies quickly knocked them dead. “The cattle will surround the bear in a wondering and gaping circle,” wrote a man who claimed to have seen such killings. “Until [the bear] who is all the while laughing in his paw at their simplicity seizes upon the first cow that comes within the grasp of his terrible claws.” Afterward, the grizzly bear walks off with his next meal, “who thus pays the expense of the performance.” 3
    Teams of grizzlies may have worked together back then, with one diverting the attention of a mark away from an approaching pair of killers. One barely believable account described a steer that stopped to watch a bear roll himself up into a ball and tumble down a hill into a pasture. “Suddenly at angles from either side two other bears rushed forth,” the story goes, “and almost before one could tell what was happening the larger of the two had reached the great steer.” At that point, it was over for the unlucky bovine: “Bruin with paw as heavy as lead felled the steer to the earth.”
    Condors tracked the movements of these bears, just as they once may have tracked the movements of dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. They would have seen what the grizzlies were up to when they rolled around playfully in the pastures, and they would have seen the traps get sprung on the unsuspecting bovines. There’s truth to the stories you hear sometimes about