Welcome to Ann Torrence photography - U.S. Highway 89, landscape, nature, people from Utah, the west, rural western U.S., national parks and international locations. Ann is writer of photography tips and and travel stories and essays.

The Day of the Condors

California Condors were reintroduced to the Grand Canyon ecosystem after a controversial captive breeding program attempted to rescue the species from extinction. This story came out of my larger project on U.S. Highway 89.

I was floating on a raft in the Grand Canyon in 1998 when I saw my first condor. Soaring 1,000' above the river, the size and flight pattern were clearly a bird I had never seen before. Our river guide grabbed his binoculars to confirm the identification, the first he'd seen in the three years since the raptors had been reintroduced to the wild.

Since that day in 1998, I've looked for condors every time I drive the old Highway 89 route over the Kaibab Plateau. Condors are known to hang out near the release site beneath the Vermillion Cliffs and even to roost in Marble Canyon near the highway bridge. I'd stop and scan, but I never saw condors.

One December day, I arrived at the south rim of the Grand Canyon just as a snowstorm was clearing. Wisps of clouds formed below the rim and dissipated as the air currents wafted them out of the canyon. Hundreds of ravens were on the move. The usually solitary birds flew by in ragged flocks, then landed just below the rim to pick through the snow on the talus. My husband counted 200 in one flock, but no condors.

As the sun heats the south-facing walls of the canyon, convective winds provide lift that raptors use to efficiently cover vast feeding territories. Unlike songbirds, larger raptors roost until the thermals develop, often late in the morning. When they launch, they spiral upward on a rising current, then descend in a shallow glide to search for prey, carrion, or another thermal. That's the condor strategy, but it wasn't working the day that I finally saw them. That morning, a spring weather system had settled cold air on the Colorado Plateau, trapping moisture below the rim. I had been trying to photograph landscapes since before dawn: an unproductive effort due to the haze. I decided to use the last of the "good light" for some photos of the El Tovar landmark. Circling over the hotel lawn were five condors. I hurried to change my lens, not realizing that the birds couldn't find a thermal in the cold air.

I tossed aside my plans for the day. I stayed hours on the esplanade between the hotel and the canyon edge trail. Condors zoomed by like jets on patrol, some below me in the canyon, others barely clearing the trees as they searched for rising air. Often they passed over so low that I could read the numbers on their shoulder tags.

A strolling mendicant naturalist of a ranger told me that a condor pair had hatched an egg below Maricopa point, along Hermits Rest Drive. I saw more condors. I watched the Corn Pollen Dancers perform outside the Hope House. Tourists asked me what I was photographing and I showed them condors. Not until mid-afternoon did the air warm up enough to take off my jacket, and about that time I stopped seeing condors.

Some scientists describe condors as a living relic of the age of gigantic mammals, evolved as carrion feeders of mastodons and giant sloths. As their diet shifted to elk and other game, the condors were reduced to perhaps a few hundred individuals by the time the arriving European settlers (prejudiced against the vulture on principal) started shooting them indiscriminately. Some prospectors even used their quills as containers for gold dust. I went back the next morning to the El Tovar patio, hoping to see the condors again. There I noticed the inscription above the hotel entry, "Dreams of Mountains as in their sleep, they brood on things eternal". Even if mountains were eternal, the condors are not. Only because of an unprecedented decision to take the last of the wild population into a captive breeding program are the condors flying over the Grand Canyon today. It is fool's errand perhaps, in evolutionary time scales, but why not? That first sight of a condor rising out of the void of the Grand Canyon can be a gift to ourselves, for as long as possible.