Condos & Condors, and Trout On A Pike

I have a horrible feeling that somehow we’ve gotten this whole endangered species thing backward Yes, we continue to carelessly destroy habitats, introduce alien species, and randomly dump industrial waste, and that’s all bad and we should stop it. But I’ve been eating dolphin safe tuna for thirty years now and the darn dolphins are still not safe. I thought these guys were supposed to be so smart! Meanwhile, nobody is trying to protect the Northern Pike of Lake Davis, California: Quite the opposite.
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Some idiot released a couple of Esox Lucius Linaeus – Northern Pike - into the small and now very un-placid Lake Davis back in 1991 because they thought Pike would be fun to catch. Unfortunately the lake already had a native population of game fish, Onocorhynchus clarki – Rainbow Trout - which are not only a popular game fish amongst tourists but are also an easy meal for the voracious Northern Pike. To the California Fish and Game Department the worry was that once these piscatorial carnivores had finished off the Trout they would swim downstream and devour the Delta Salmon populations, which Fish and Game had just spent tens of millions of dollars re-introducing. So, since 1997 the California Fish and Game Department has spent something in excess of $24 million trying to kill off these finned invaders, and that effort hasn’t proven to be fun for anybody, except possibly the Pike.
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The Northern Pike of Lake Davis have been poisoned. They have been electrocuted. They have been shot, netted, hooked, cornered, dynamited, starved and suffocated. The state even drained the lake. For over a year the local human population couldn’t drink the water, it was so full of piperonyl butoxide. The pike barely noticed the stuff. These fish aren’t on any endangered species list, they’re on the ten most wanted list. They’ve got more people gunning for them than Osama bin Laden.
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When nothing else worked Fish and Game tried stocking Lake Davis with oversized Trout fry, thinking they would be too big for the young Pike fry to eat and the Pike would then starve to death. In response the Pike began growing nine to fourteen times faster than normal. They became super-pike, Franken-fry, Fry-enators, big nasty Pike which had no trouble swallowing the abnormally large Trout.
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Six hundred Pike were caught in Fish and Game sample nets the year after the lake was poisoned. In 2004 the catch was 17,635. In fact, about 60,500 Pike have been caught in Lake Davis since humans began trying to eradicating them.
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In May of 2005 the Pike Fry were caught trying to find away around the Pike screens on the spillway. And in 2006, after a winter of heavy snow pack and spring rains, Lake Davis came within inches of overflowing the spillway entirely, releasing the Pike into the Sacramento River system. Still, not willing to admit he has been beaten by a mere fish, Steve Martarano of California Fish and Game gamely insisted, “We’ve gotten better at knowing where the Pike are.”
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Yeah, Steve: they’re in the water.
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Well, this past January, 2007, Fish and Game announced plans to try it one more time. In a $12 million program about 48,000 acre feet of “rotenone”, a commonly used and “safe” pesticide, will be dumped into the lake, and this, fish and game assures everyone, will finally kill off the Pike without killing the people or the local economy. Again.
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And if this doesn’t work I suggest we try some fresh approaches, perhaps getting Vice President Cheney to designate Lake Davis a “National Fish Oil Reserve”. If there were oil involved the Bush Administration would have those Pike clear-cut in a week. But perhaps the Pike of Lake Davis are trying to tell us something very simple. Perhaps we’ve been misunderstanding Mother Nature. Maybe the reason the spotted owls are endangered is that we’ve been coddling them.
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Consider the lowly pigeon; there isn’t a city anywhere in the world that isn’t forced to budget money for pigeon population control. What’s the feathered tree rats’ secret of success? At Cardiff University in Wales experiments show that pigeons recognize and remember individual human faces, and they learn which individual humans to avoid.
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Meanwhile biologists raising endangered California condor chicks use hand puppets to feed the baby vultures, so they will have no positive human interaction before they are released. But despite these efforts about a half dozen of the first juvenile Condors freed chose to hang out at the Pine Mountain Club, a condo resort village down the road from Fraser Park, in the Tehachapi mountain range between Central and Southern California, where it seems the birds figured out on their own that their razor sharp beaks and talons designed to rip open animal carcasses worked even better on plastic trash bags and kitchen window screens.
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One “naturalist” studying the Condor-condo interaction returned home after a hard day of remote Condor observing via powerful binoculars to discover three of the 30 pound birds with 10’ wingspans, gallivanting about his bedroom, using it as a sort of free flow toilet.
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I’m not making this up. They had entered via a slit they made in his window screen. One was in his underwear drawer shredding his shorts while the other two were slowly dissecting his mattress with all the abandon of adolescences free from parental oversight.
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It almost looked as if the birds had picked out this guy personally, and maybe they had. The average human would have defended their turf and gone into that room with a broom and driven the squatters out the way they had come in. But this guy was a “naturalist”. To avoid interacting with the feathered truants he retreated until the birds got bored and left on their own.
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The “naturalists” then convinced local politicians to require all trash to be held inside until the morning of collection, and then placed only in locking containers. And at the landfill the garbage bags would be immediately covered with dirt. The thinking was that without an easy food supply the condors would leave.
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Instead the Condor gangs’ response was to loom about on the roof of a local restaurant, depressing the hell out of potential customers. The condors were actually waiting for the trash trucks to arrive. They would then use their extraordinary skills at gliding to follow behind the trucks as if they were injured wooly mammoths, all the way to the dump, where they quickly descended on any leftover macaroni and cheese containers.
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The front loaders couldn’t cover the trash bags without the risk of burying a condor at the same time, so the meals could now be eaten at leisure in a sort of Condor olfactory playground. Game, set, and match to the Condors.
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The biologists and naturalists were horrified because it didn’t fit their image of noble Condors sailing in an empty sky above an untouched wilderness - which is where the Condors almost became extinct in the first place. Need I point out that not a single condor died at the Pine Mountain Club? They ate too many French fries but none of them died!
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The happy ending to this story of rebellious Condors is that once they matured and mated the adult condors didn’t want their offspring growing up in an urban environment anymore than Republicans do. Today, the Pine Mountain Club is condor free except for a few weeks every summer when, like Amish teenagers on rumspringa, the newly adolescent vultures fly in for a sort of avian spring break. They eat spicy food, taunt the humans and stage panty raids on the naturalists.
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Now, I’m not suggesting we try protecting endangered species with dynamite or by raising their cholesterol levels, but it does seem that the animals we’re protecting are all in trouble while the ones we’re trying to exterminate are experiencing population booms. What can we learn from this?
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Well, there are six billion humans on this planet at present. Modern Condors, searching for dinner while soaring above the wilderness are going to see a lot more humans than dead deer. So why not “humanize” them, teach them what every mentally retarded pigeon knows; the fries are better at Burger King, don’t drink the yellow water, never trust a politician in an election year and don’t go swimming in Lake Davis unless you want your talons bitten off.
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