California condors have endured a tumultuous relationship with their human neighbors, to say the least. Early settlers in the West would kill or capture the birds, take their eggs, and diminish the supply of their usual prey. Killing condors was made illegal nearly a century ago, but that hasn’t stopped people from disturbing them—condors suffered in recent decades from poisonous agricultural pesticides, lead contamination, and accidental collision with man-made structures and wires.
By the late 1970s, only a few dozen condors existed in the wild. They were captured, bred, rehabilitated, and released back into the wild along the Central Coast and in Arizona and Mexico. As of last year, the population had bounced back to exceed 400.
But the California condor’s problems are far from over.
The latest threat: oil drilling and fracking in Los Padres National Forest, which makes up most of the condor’s habitat in California. Two sites in the forest are leased to oil companies for drilling, including the South Cuyama Oil Field in the Cuyama Valley. And several others—adding up to 52,000 acres—are zoned to allow for oil and gas development under a plan created by federal agencies in 2005.
But environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and Los Padres ForestWatch, have undertaken a mission to halt oil development in the forest. Their latest action includes revising a 9-year-old lawsuit demanding that the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other federal agencies re-evaluate their latest biological opinion on wildlife impacts by the Los Padres oil development plan.
Fish and Wildlife found in its report, released in September, that protective measures for the condor proposed by the Forest Service “are likely to prevent mortality or physical injury of individual condors due to microtrash, powerline collisions, contaminants, and other potential threats otherwise posed to condors by the proposed leasing program.”
The opinion conceded that oil and gas development activity would reduce the likelihood of condor habituation in the wild and ultimately result in the loss of up to two non-breeding California condors—but as far as ForestWatch is concerned, that’s two too many.
“It adds up to a lot of condors,” ForestWatch Executive Director Jeff Kuyper told the Sun. “There’s a cumulative impact, and we’re concerned that because the population of condors is so low already—there’s about 200 condors in the wild in California—harm to a single condor is extremely significant and should be avoided at all costs.”
Kuyper said oil drilling poses significant threats to the condors and their environment, including habitat destruction, the ingestion of microtrash, coating the birds with oil, and habituation impacts, which compromise the condor’s ability to thrive and reproduce in its natural environment (without human intervention).
“Microtrash” refers to small pieces of trash, such as broken glass and bottle caps. Kuyper said condors have been known to pick up these items, bring them back to the nest, and feed them to their young, who aren’t able to process the trash through their digestive systems and sometimes die or require surgery after eating it.
The habituation issue is both the most serious and the hardest to measure scientifically, Kuyper said. When condors start landing on oil pads or other manmade structures, it affects their ability to exist independently in the wild. The birds can fly up to 150 miles each day and require expansive untouched habitat in order to thrive, Kuyper said. And when they become accustomed to human development, they become less wild.
“It’s hard for biologists to detect changes in condor behavior and prove that cause-and-effect relationship, but it is a common concern among biologists that condors spending time around any developed facility, and especially oil fields, does cause a situation,” he said.
Condors also maintain sensitive nesting processes, being that they lay only one egg every two years.
“Oil drilling is an extremely loud industrial operation, and condors need big wide open areas to survive in the wild,” Kuyper said. “Any time you have this highly industrialized and really intense activity in these remote areas, that’s going to have a behavioral impact on the condors. It could interrupt their nesting and roosting behavior. It could result in nest failure.”
Still, Forest Service Public Affairs Officer Andrew Madsen told the Sun that the agency stands by its wildlife impact report. As for the impacts that oil drilling in Los Padres has had on the condors so far, he said the Forest Service is working with the leasing oil companies to mitigate those problems in the future, particularly those related to microtrash ingestion.
“We’ve taken a lot of steps out there,” Madsen said. “We’ve conveyed to the company the need to reduce that out there, so they’ve taken additional steps. We’re not aware of any recent incidents involving condors and microtrash in the area.”
In a report released in December 2015, ForestWatch aggregated documented impacts of oil development on condors in Los Padres. While the report confirmed that microtrash hadn’t been an issue recently, it did show multiple incidents of condors landing on oil pads.
“If they become used to oil development in their habitat, they’ll become more inclined to land on homes, roofs, and radio towers, where they can pick up trash,” Kuyper said.
He said that the lawsuit is demanding that federal agencies better recognize the impacts that current and potential oil development could have on California condors.
“Our most recent action was notifying these agencies that once again their evaluation of impacts to endangered wildlife is incomplete and not consistent with the best available science and thus violates the Endangered Species Act,” Kuyper said. “Ultimately, we’re asking them to simply comply with laws that are on the books that are designed to protect our country’s wildlife.”
Brenna Swanston can be reached at bswanston@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2016.
