Almond trees are blooming as we close this end-of-winter issue, and golden California poppies raise their heads above the soggy ground. Soon, five young condors will be released on the Coast Ridge in Big Sur, bringing to 19 the number flying free in ancestral territory along the central coast.

Spreading giant wings—nine feet from tip to tip—they will rise on the updrafts and ride the winds, patrolling 100 square miles or so a day. They will swoop along slopes in Los Padres National Forest and the Ventana Wilderness, soar above peaks and valleys, drop down over the shoreline to check for dead sea mammals, and fly southeast over historically rich feeding grounds in the San Antonio Valley and the Santa Lucia Mountains. They are larger than eagles—so large, according to The Sibley Guide to Birds, “they may be mistaken for an airplane.”

At what is now Ft. Hunter Liggett in those mountains, the U.S. Navy plans to build a bull’s-eye target to train pilots flying F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets (the kind flown by the Blue Angels; wingspan 40 feet). It projects close to 3,000 sorties a year, five days a week over 47 weeks. An average sortie involves three aircraft taking several runs at the target, dropping dummy bombs (that don’t explode) from as low as 500 feet.

The jets would come from Lemoore Naval Air Station, near Fresno, and also from aircraft carriers offshore, roaring across the famous natural quiet of wild lands where condors and bald eagles have come back from the brink of extinction.

How will the condors react? Nobody knows. Nor can anyone say how the eagles will fare. There’s a nesting pair now at Ft. Hunter Liggett, says Jim Davis, executive director of the Ventana Wilderness Society, which has been highly successful in reintroducing both condors and eagles.

Will the sea otters mind? They dive when startled. That could be dangerous for nursing pups. The Navy has stated that there will be no flights over the California Sea Otter Refuge or over known eagle and condor nesting sites. But who knows where condors and eagles will choose to nest as they increase in number?

Biologists hope that an in-depth Environmental Impact Statement, with studies, will precede any bombing program. Others worry about disturbance of another rare quality. “Solitude and serenity are an important coastal resource,” said Lee Otter, district director of the Coastal Commission’s Central Coast District. In a letter to the Navy, the Commission’s federal consistency supervisor, Mark Delaplane, has suggested “an analysis of potentially less damaging alternative sites not involving Fort Hunter Liggett (such as use of existing bombing ranges at China Lake and other locations).”

The Navy says this program will save fuel costs, perhaps $3 million a year: Hunter Liggett is about 100 miles closer to Lemoore than the currently used practice site in Nevada.

To bring the condor back from the brink of extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other public agencies have so far spent some $35 million, mostly for programs in southern California and Arizona. The highly successful work of the Ventana Wilderness Society is entirely financed by private and corporate funds and donations, according to Davis.

But dollars are hardly the issue here. Something much more valuable is at stake.

The California condor is the largest land bird in North America and one of the largest in the world. It was here in the Pleistocene and we almost lost it. In the early 1980s, only 22 or 23 were alive. Now they’re coming back because the people of this country refused to let them vanish forever. Just to know that we might see this giant vulture’s wings spread against the sky over Big Sur is thrilling. It’s to be filled with hope and gratitude.

The condor’s plunge toward extinction began in the 1890s–1910s, when eggs were stolen from nests and adult birds were shot for sale to museums and collectors. The bird mates for life and can live for 60 years, but breeds slowly: one hatching about every 18 months, says Davis.

Later came poisoning. Ranchers and farmers set out bait laced with arsenic and other toxins to kill coyotes. “A lot of condors were killed,” Davis explains, because “Condors are obligant scavengers; they only eat dead things.”

Yet now the total population of the birds has grown to 160, with 45 in the wild (14 in the central coast, 10 in the Sespe Wilderness in Ventura County, and 21 in Arizona). Environmental laws and changing ranching practices have greatly diminished the poison hazard, Davis says, and the main toxic threat now is lead shot consumed from carcasses abandoned by hunters. He says “habitat is not a problem” in Los Padres National Forest and the Ventana Wilderness.

Still, the condor’s hold on survival is extremely tenuous. It needs protection.

With spring now arriving, this is a good time to see the early wildflowers in the grand natural quiet of Big Sur. Listening to the barking sea lions and the otters knocking with rocks on abalone shells, you can imagine yourself back in time, perhaps even back into the Pleistocene as you consider the bears, mountain lions, and tule elk nearby, and the bald eagles and condors learning to fly free above the Coast Ridge.

—Rasa Gustaitis