Argentina: plight of the condor

Little is known about the world's largest flying bird of prey. Sally Ballard finds out about its battle for survival amid the magnificent Andean landscape

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Three condors circle overhead, silhouetted against a sun-scorched sky. There is not a sound to be heard, not a person to be seen in this parched, endless expanse. This is the Place of the Vultures, an isolated valley in the dusty scrub-carpeted folds of the Andean foothills in Argentina. It is stunningly beautiful in its bleakness and loneliness.

We watch, heads tipped back, as the evening sun slips behind a sheer-face outcrop of golden volcanic rock. A male condor moves in and, with incredible accuracy, adjusts his speed and position. He swoops down, glides his bulk upwards and closes in on the naked rock to land on a precipitous ledge. The others continue to circle as they consider their homecoming. For this is condor sleep time and some 40 to 70 may bed down here in any one night.

The rockface is streaked white with droppings and the condors will remain here until morning. Then, each will spread its nine-foot, black wingspan, catch an updraught and soar off in search of food.

The setting is mind altering. We have driven barely half an hour out of the mountains from the busy fake-alpine lakeside town of San Carlos de Bariloche (1,000 miles and two hours flying time from Buenos Aires). Bariloche is also known as Little Switzerland. Swiss, German and Italian immigrants settled in these mountainous foothills, whose beauty lies in their forested mountain scenery and endless stretches of deep, dark blue lakes. But here, just a turn of the head away from what could be called a European landscape magnified, here, with a foot in Patagonia, we are in a land of raw emptiness and stillness.

Two days ago I knew nothing about Andean condors, the world's largest flying bird of prey and perhaps one of the ugliest of all flying creatures. But now I can tell the grey-necked female from the creamy yellow-necked male (it goes red when excited). I can look out for the turkey-like wattle above the male's beak, spot the telltale white neck ruff and distinguish its spread-fingers silhouette. I can look at its profile in flight and tell whether one has eaten or not (a condor can carry two pounds of food in its pouch). I can appreciate the white flashes on the upper wing (thought to be a communication system, rather like semaphore). I also have a better understanding of the condor's battle for survival as man threatens its habitat. In some parts of South America, the condor has been wiped out, and in other parts its numbers are dwindling. I now find a certain charm in the wrinkled-neck ugliness and I am fascinated by its disgusting head-deep-in-the-dead-body table manners.

At my side, in this vast landscape of orange-brown, where the Argentinian Andes sweep out to the endless Patagonian plains, is ornithologist Lorenzo Sympson. "You can tell if a carcass has been eaten by a puma or by condor," he tells me. "The puma ravages the animal, rips it apart; the condor makes a few small tears in the skin and pushes its head through. It will go for the lungs and liver first. A group of condor will pick a sheep carcass clean in four hours."

Lorenzo is one of the world's most knowledgeable field experts on the Andean condor. A second-generation Argentinian of Scottish and English immigrant grandparents, he was born into a middle-class ranching family who spoke English at home and took tea at 5pm. He was training to be a vet at university in Buenos Aires when he was jailed and then exiled. A student with socialist leanings, he was one of the thousands who faced exile, death or simply "disappeared" during the days of the Argentinian junta.

Lorenzo was sent to farm in Peru's deepest jungle. Some 12 years later, he pieced his life together again, returned to the country of his birth and became a ranch manager of 12,000 acres near Bariloche, a town devoted to chocolate-making and tourism in the heart of Argentina's first national park.

He would spend weeks out in the Patagonian steppes rounding up cattle and watching the birds in the sky, indulging a lifelong interest in ornithology. He could see that tourism and working with the environment, rather than altering the environment for huge-scale farming, was the way forward. And, once again, his life was turned around. He was snapped up by the University of Santa Cruz, California, thanks to his knowledge of condors, and launched his own business organising bird-watching, tourism, researching, writing, lecturing and hoisting TV crews up precipitous rock faces in his bid to raise the world's knowledge of these little-understood birds.

Intrigued by Lorenzo Sympson and his reputation, here am I, someone for whom bird-watching has never been high on my must-do list, in Argentina on a bird-watching trip. Time is short, so we leave spotting the screeching green austral parrot, hunting out the secretive woodland floor tapaculos, listening for the stunningly vivid redheaded Magellanic woodpecker and viewing the white water diving torrent duck. Instead, we track condor.

We start the day by crossing the River Limay, a river of sparkling glacial water that flows from the Nahuel Huapi lake and whose weeping-willowed banks provide shelter for numerous birds and in whose cool waters live enormous brown and brook trout (introduced from Britain) and rainbow and landlocked salmon (introduced from the United States). Fly-fishermen travel the world to wade the rivers here – the average catch weighs 10lbs.

We leave the river below us and toil 800 feet uphill, in inhospitable temperatures through sandy scrub, which gives way to loose scree. Ahead of us are the tortured yellow rock formations of a volcanic past. We stop at a cave which gives shade and shelter from the sun. And I look at the amazing view below.

"You see the small opening in the rock face over the gully?" asks Lorenzo. "Some of the roosting sites and nesting sites are hundreds of years old. We plan to analyse the guano to see just how old they are." My amazement threshold is being stretched as I stand peering at indentations, trying to find words to describe the naked rawness of the place. Then three black shapes interrupt the expanse of blue.

They are condors. And I spot them first. And at that moment I am converted to bird-watching. Overhead the black shapes soar on an azurine canvas as Lorenzo guides us to a small hut with a cantilevered platform hanging over an emptiness below. This is where five young condor bred in Buenos Aires Zoo and destined for Colombia ended up, gliding over the vastness of Patagonia, its salt lakes coloured pink with the tides of wading flamingos. And all thanks to political differences.

These condor now ride the thermals over plains once teeming with the doe-eyed guanaco, a member of the llama family and one-time staple diet of the native Indians who once peopled the plains. Guanaco were shot by farmers at the turn of the century because they competed with cattle for the grass. With them went the Indians' source of food. Ironically, there are now suggestions they should be farmed to provide an upmarket fine wool as world fleece prices plummet. Sheep farming, the former money-maker of Patagonia, is fast becoming unprofitable.

These five shadows in the sky are part of a healthy population of some 200 Andean condors in the area. But, outside zoo-based knowledge, little is known about the Andean condor except its life cycle is not conducive to reproductive success.

It is to this that Lorenzo now tirelessly devotes his time. Only two years ago he and his son Guillermo winched a Japanese television crew up to a vertiginous nesting site to set in place video cameras for months of filming. This was the first time a nesting condor's life had been viewed in the wild. The team were astonished by what they saw, the lonely, parent-absent existence that befalls a condor chick. Hours of video film showed that the chick, in its no-nest cave, has parental contact for only three to four minutes a day. The parent pumps the ugly, grey, down-covered chick with regurgitated food and then flies off to sleep on a roosting ledge elsewhere. The chick is left to wander the small cave alone, picking at stones and feathers until, some eight months later, it can take off in search of a life above some of the world's most stunning scenery.

Lorenzo says: "My wife keeps asking me to study something more beautiful." But, perhaps, to Lorenzo, the beauty of the condor lies in the excuse it gives him to roam this magnificent landscape as free and as unfettered as the condor itself.

Sally Ballard travelled with Aerolineas Argentinas, the country's main domestic airline. Tailor-made bird-watching holidays can be arranged through Abercrombie and Kent 0845 0700614 www.abercrombiekent.co.uk and others – see Take a walk on the wild side, opposite. Lorenzo Sympson can be contacted at lorsymp@bariloche.com.ar