Fight of the Condors

Illustrations by P. J. Fidler

The road to the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge is not for the faint of stomach. It winds and unwinds up the steep mountains of the Los Padres National Forest, through a landscape of oil rigs and dirt roads. Cleaved from the hillsides, the roads have the shock value of scarification on the face of a West African tribesman.

The woman driving the Ford Bronco is Denise Stockton. She works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, telling the public, and reporters, about California condors. Her husband, Mike, is one of the biologists who tend to condors, the largest birds in North America. Condors were practically extinct in the 1980s; their reintroduction in California and Arizona has cost the American taxpayers $35 million so far. Yet the condor’s future is far from assured.

Denise and Mike Stockton have raised a couple of kids together. They talk about the condors as if they are rambunctious teenagers with personalities, even though the birds’ names sound like machine guns or superviruses. Two years ago, on nearby Tejon Ranch, a hunter killed one of the last condors born in the wild, and nobody seemed any less grief-stricken because the bird’s name was AC-8.

“Is that a plane?” I ask uncertainly, pointing to what looks like a glider passing over the hills.

Denise laughs. “You’re getting to see a condor,” she says.

We follow the silhouette along a ridge, and there they are, unmistakable, half a dozen enormous black birds, jointed and angular like skeletons made visible. With white bands on the underside of their wings, the condors have markings similar to turkey vultures. Genetically they are closer to storks, but visually they resemble nothing so much as pterodactyls. When they fly, condors change the horizon; they inhabit it. These birds make the Western sky look smaller.

It’s what’s under the sky that’s the problem. Condors forage along the steep hillsides and shadow the valleys of 277,000-acre Tejon Ranch. Like the condor, the enormous, primeval-looking ranch is a remnant of pre-suburban California. But Tejon is on the fast track to the 21st century: Developers are planning the single largest housing development in Los Angeles County history here. The project hasn’t been approved yet, but it’s hard to imagine anyone powerful enough to stop construction of a brand-new city worth a staggering $57 billion in today’s dollars. That’s enough to make the $35 million spent on condor reintroduction so far look like birdseed. Biologists fear that development on Tejon Ranch — the project now on the boards is likely to be just the beginning — will create a domino effect of sprawling settlement on one of the last frontiers of rural California. This can’t be good for the condor, not even with a proposed third of the ranch possibly made off-limits to developers, or for the region’s small-town way of life, something that’s equally endangered in 21st-century America.

If the California condor is an icon, so is Tejon Ranch. At 432 square miles, it is the largest piece of privately owned land in California: one-third the size of Rhode Island,

12 times the size of Manhattan, almost as huge as the entire city of Los Angeles . The ranch is a blank spot on the map circled by Bakersfield, the Los Padres National Forest, the high desert of the Antelope Valley, the coastal ranges and the southern Sierra. With all these dramatically different landscapes converging, it’s not surprising that the region contains a plethora of politically inconvenient (read: endangered or threatened) plant and animal species, from the blunt-nosed leopard lizard to the Mexican flannel bush. It’s even less surprising that it’s a migratory route for deer, mountain lions, bobcats and other large animals.

The ranch is also a microcosm — albeit a big one — of the state’s human history, which helps explain why it is still in one piece. Like most of the large ranches in Southern California, Tejon was once a Spanish land grant. In 1912, three prominent California businessmen bought Tejon: Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler; Moses Sherman, the developer of Sherman Oaks; and another real estate developer named Arnold Haskell.

Throughout its various incarnations, Tejon has remained a working cattle ranch and a farming operation, producing the usual assortment of California commodities. Now, in its most recent incarnation, Tejon itself is a commodity.

In 1997, Third Avenue Management, a New York–based investment firm that manages mutual funds, bought about a third of the shares of Tejon Ranch, which had been a publicly traded company for generations. Third Avenue is known for buying stock in companies on the edge of disaster to capitalize on their real estate holdings; the firm recently snapped up troubled Kmart because of the chain’s valuable locations. On Wall Street, firms like Third Avenue are called “vulture investors.”

Even before Third Avenue stepped in, Tejon’s board of directors clearly had plans to squeeze more revenue out of the ranch. In the mid-’90s they hired a CEO named Bob Stine, a man with a track record in San Diego real estate development. The ranch straddles Kern and Los Angeles counties, so Stine knew he’d have two county governments to face if he wanted to turn the ranch from a playground for the likes of Otis Chandler into the brave new world of postmillennial suburban California. Stine moved to Bakersfield and proceeded to hire from within — L.A. and Kern county government, that is. Barry Zoeller, the ranch’s PR man, is the former executive director of the Kern County Board of Trade. Joe Drew, Tejon’s vice president in charge of commercial and industrial development, is a former Kern County administrator — and a former chief of the Los Angeles MTA who resigned after questions were raised about contracts awarded to a low-rated bidder.