There are few things more inspiring in modern wildlife management than watching a species fight its way back from the brink of extinction. There are even fewer things more inspiring than watching activists and researchers explain why that recovery is actually evidence of an ongoing catastrophe. Consider the California condor.
In 1987, the situation was so dire that every remaining wild condor was captured and placed into a captive breeding program. The species was hanging on by a thread. The first wild-hatched condor chick in the modern recovery era didn’t appear until 2003. By 2010, there were roughly 100 condors in the wild. Today, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the population has climbed to more than 600 birds worldwide, with hundreds flying free. By virtually any historical standard, it is one of the greatest conservation success stories in North America. Naturally, this can mean only one thing: hunters are destroying the condor.
If that conclusion seems confusing, that’s because you’re still trapped in the outdated belief that causes should precede effects. Modern environmental politics has evolved far beyond such primitive thinking. In the new scientific method, if a species is increasing, it is still declining in a hypothetical model. If the thing allegedly causing the decline has already been banned, then it is obviously causing the decline even harder. This brings us to the latest round of studies warning that spent lead ammunition remains an existential threat to condors.
The premise is familiar. Condors eat carcasses. Hunters use lead ammunition. Therefore, hunters are responsible for virtually every lead-related problem a condor experiences, from poisoning to poor life choices to perhaps occasionally forgetting where it parked its wings.
There is, however, one tiny complication. California banned lead ammunition for hunting statewide in 2019. Hunters are required to use certified nonlead ammunition when taking wildlife, and state reports have indicated compliance rates approaching 99 percent. This creates a difficult challenge for anyone still determined to blame hunters. Imagine investigating a string of burglaries and discovering the suspect moved to another continent six years ago. Most detectives would look for a new suspect. But not our intrepid anti-hunting crusaders.
Instead, they double down. Perhaps, they suggest, hunters are secretly using lead ammunition despite near-universal compliance. Perhaps condors are locating hidden caches of illegal bullets buried deep in the wilderness. Perhaps they are excavating berms at shooting ranges with tiny archaeological brushes. Perhaps every condor has developed a side hustle as a metal detector enthusiast.
Whatever the explanation, it apparently cannot be paint chips, old mining waste, contaminated soil, legacy lead from decades of leaded gasoline, insecticides, microtrash, habitat destruction, power line collisions, windmills and other ‘green’ energy, avian influenza, or any of the other factors that have been documented as threats to condors. That would be far too obvious.
One review conducted by the Hunt for Truth Association examined the studies used to justify California’s ammunition restrictions and concluded that alternative sources of environmental lead were frequently downplayed or ignored.
Among the examples cited were observations of condors eating paint chips from structures and then feeding those fragments to their chicks. The report also noted that actual bullet fragments have rarely, if ever, been conclusively recovered from condor digestive tracts despite years of investigation.
Whether one agrees with every conclusion of that analysis or not, it raises an uncomfortable question: why is there so little curiosity about sources of lead that aren’t connected to hunters? After all, California is not exactly a pristine laboratory untouched by a century of industrial activity. It is a state filled with abandoned mines, old structures coated in lead paint, contaminated soils, historic agricultural chemicals, and enough environmental legacy pollution to keep grant writers employed through the next ice age. Yet somehow the narrative always circles back to deer hunters.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the debate is the way it treats condors as uniquely vulnerable creatures operating under laws of biology that apparently apply to no other scavenger on Earth. If lead ammunition fragments are so widespread and devastating that they are driving condors toward extinction—even after the ammunition has been banned for years—then where are the corresponding collapses among ravens, crows, magpies, turkey vultures, bald eagles, golden eagles and countless other scavengers that consume carrion across the West?
These species somehow manage to inhabit the same landscapes, feed on many of the same carcasses, and survive exposure to the same environment without generating the same level of political panic. One might expect armies of collapsing raven populations, emergency summits for crows, federal disaster declarations for magpies and national mourning ceremonies for vultures and eagles. Instead, America is experiencing something closer to a raven surplus and an eagle resurgence.
Perhaps condors are uniquely vulnerable. Perhaps there are biological explanations that deserve investigation. But that is precisely the point. Real science follows evidence wherever it leads. Advocacy begins with a conclusion and works backward.
The condor story should actually be a celebration of hunters, not an indictment of them. Hunters have contributed billions of dollars to wildlife conservation through Pittman-Robertson excise taxes on firearms and ammunition. Those funds have restored habitat, supported wildlife management and helped recover countless species. Ironically, many of the same people accused of destroying wildlife have paid more for conservation than many of the organizations accusing them.
This is where the satire practically writes itself. The condor population grows. Hunters comply with ammunition restrictions. Conservation funding continues flowing from hunters. Captive breeding programs succeed. Wild releases expand. New nests appear. Population records are broken. And the conclusion remains: hunters are the problem.
At some point, one begins to suspect that no amount of recovery will ever be enough. If condors reach 1,000 birds, the headlines will likely warn that hunters are preventing 2,000. If they reach 2,000, a model will predict 10,000 under a scenario in which all lead atoms are removed from the solar system. By the time condors are nesting on Starbucks drive-thrus and fighting seagulls for parking spaces, someone will still be publishing a paper explaining that the species is one hunter away from oblivion.
The California condor is one of America’s greatest wildlife recovery stories. It deserves honest science, rigorous inquiry and a preparedness to investigate every potential threat. What it does not need is another decade of activists treating a six-year-old ammunition ban as though it has not happened while ignoring every inconvenient fact that complicates the preferred narrative. Then again, if the condor ever fully recovers, some people might have to find a new villain.
And that would truly be endangered.
– Chris Dorsey
Chris Dorsey is a 30-year media veteran and conservation thought leader who is the founding partner of Dorsey Pictures, a Global 100 Production Studio, and Mission Partners Entertainment Group, a leading IMAX/giant screen natural history producer.