vultures that really do swirl over the heads of dying animals. Iâve been told that condors did it all the time. They know how to wait for the right moment.
Actually, the surveillance may well have been mutual: California grizzlies may well have tracked the movements of the condors thatwere tracking them. Storer and Tevis couldnât prove that point, but they could offer expert speculation.
The burying of carcasses, a practice of both the grizzly and the mountain lion, may have been an effort to circumvent the big scavenger birds. Conversely, the condor may have aided the grizzly. Soaring aloft at a great height and for much of the daylight hours, one of the birds could locate a carcass. As it dropped down other birds would converge toward the site. Maybe the vulture congregations guided the bear to such a feast. When he arrived, however, the birds would flap their wings vigorously and take off to avoid being included in the bearâs repast.
Given the level of cleverness shown by both the bears and the condors, I canât help but wonder whether the big birds ever did more than flag the dying and the dead. Condors stay alive by anticipating sneak attacks, both on themselves and on the animals theyâd eat if only they were dead. What I wonder is whether the birds enabled the bears by circling the weak and the dying like the vultures in Western movies do. And if they did these sorts of things, where did they draw the line? When a soaring condor saw a healthy cow get separated from the herd, did it ever pause or circle in ways that might have drawn the grizzlies in?
Thereâs another key link between the condors and the bears: both species tended to thrive near the low, nasty forests known as the chaparral. In the summer, lightning strikes and tiny floating embers triggered instant infernos there, but when the smoke cleared, the forests always grew back thicker than they were before. Grizzly bears and condors seemed to use these forests as a defensive shield, and for a time it served them well. 4
Old-time nature writers tended to wax eloquent on the subject of chaparral: in the 1920s, these areas were sometimes referred to as nothing less than âElfin Forests.â A writer named Francis Fultz was the one who coined that title, and he does not appear to have been joking; Fultz said heâd take chaparral trees over redwoods any day. âDame Nature knew her business when she developed the chaparral,â he opined. âWithout it the mountains would be stark pinnacles and naked ridges, the foothills barren, the rocky slopes and the valleys nothing but beds of cobblestones and gravel.â Fultz was among the first to see how varied these forests were, claiming that his âelfin woodsâ contained a wider range of plants and trees than any other forest in the country.
Thereâs no doubt that Fultz is right about all this: chaparral forests are diverse and they can be magical. If you look around youâll find tiny twisted oak trees and tiny twisted pines, mixed together so tightly that you canât see through them. The smell of mint is everywhere, and in the spring the wildflowers are amazing. You want to crawl around in there until you find the dancing elves.
But when you do, your skin is ripped by knifelike thorns or covered with painful red rashes. Your machete bouces backward off a springy branch and hits you right between the eyes. You creep through a maze of tunnels underneath the chaparral that appears to have sealed it off. Hours later, after crawling through a drainpipe-size opening into the blessed sunlight, you pull your face up out of the dirt when you hear the sound of an approaching bear. Or maybe itâs a coyote, or a mountain lion. All you know for sure is that itâs big and you donât want to know what it is, so you dive back into the elfin forest, looking for another way out. You trip and plant your face in a hornetâs nest or another thorny
Actually, the surveillance may well have been mutual: California grizzlies may well have tracked the movements of the condors thatwere tracking them. Storer and Tevis couldnât prove that point, but they could offer expert speculation.
The burying of carcasses, a practice of both the grizzly and the mountain lion, may have been an effort to circumvent the big scavenger birds. Conversely, the condor may have aided the grizzly. Soaring aloft at a great height and for much of the daylight hours, one of the birds could locate a carcass. As it dropped down other birds would converge toward the site. Maybe the vulture congregations guided the bear to such a feast. When he arrived, however, the birds would flap their wings vigorously and take off to avoid being included in the bearâs repast.
Given the level of cleverness shown by both the bears and the condors, I canât help but wonder whether the big birds ever did more than flag the dying and the dead. Condors stay alive by anticipating sneak attacks, both on themselves and on the animals theyâd eat if only they were dead. What I wonder is whether the birds enabled the bears by circling the weak and the dying like the vultures in Western movies do. And if they did these sorts of things, where did they draw the line? When a soaring condor saw a healthy cow get separated from the herd, did it ever pause or circle in ways that might have drawn the grizzlies in?
Thereâs another key link between the condors and the bears: both species tended to thrive near the low, nasty forests known as the chaparral. In the summer, lightning strikes and tiny floating embers triggered instant infernos there, but when the smoke cleared, the forests always grew back thicker than they were before. Grizzly bears and condors seemed to use these forests as a defensive shield, and for a time it served them well. 4
Old-time nature writers tended to wax eloquent on the subject of chaparral: in the 1920s, these areas were sometimes referred to as nothing less than âElfin Forests.â A writer named Francis Fultz was the one who coined that title, and he does not appear to have been joking; Fultz said heâd take chaparral trees over redwoods any day. âDame Nature knew her business when she developed the chaparral,â he opined. âWithout it the mountains would be stark pinnacles and naked ridges, the foothills barren, the rocky slopes and the valleys nothing but beds of cobblestones and gravel.â Fultz was among the first to see how varied these forests were, claiming that his âelfin woodsâ contained a wider range of plants and trees than any other forest in the country.
Thereâs no doubt that Fultz is right about all this: chaparral forests are diverse and they can be magical. If you look around youâll find tiny twisted oak trees and tiny twisted pines, mixed together so tightly that you canât see through them. The smell of mint is everywhere, and in the spring the wildflowers are amazing. You want to crawl around in there until you find the dancing elves.
But when you do, your skin is ripped by knifelike thorns or covered with painful red rashes. Your machete bouces backward off a springy branch and hits you right between the eyes. You creep through a maze of tunnels underneath the chaparral that appears to have sealed it off. Hours later, after crawling through a drainpipe-size opening into the blessed sunlight, you pull your face up out of the dirt when you hear the sound of an approaching bear. Or maybe itâs a coyote, or a mountain lion. All you know for sure is that itâs big and you donât want to know what it is, so you dive back into the elfin forest, looking for another way out. You trip and plant your face in a hornetâs nest or another thorny
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