SURVEIL + PROTECT
ON A BRIGHT MORNING IN LATE JANUARY, AMANDA Wilhelm stood inside an observation tower nestled among Joshua trees at the Tehachapi Wind Resource Area, monitoring the movements of a California Condor. She wasn’t peering outside at the hundreds of brilliant white turbines, but down at a string of letters and numbers on a monitor. To the uninitiated, the code—SB#=237 … Ant 1-North SS=77—looks like gibberish. For Wilhelm, field operations manager for Alta Environmental Services, those numbers were clues. No. 237 is an endangered condor, one of 80 that inhabit this pocket of Southern California. At 2:48 p.m. the previous day the north antenna picked up its radio transmitter signal. “The signal strength is 77, which means it wasn’t very close,” she said.
The modest beige tower is the nerve center of a high-tech system developed to prevent No. 237 or any other condor from colliding with one of those many turbines. In 2010, as plans were being hatched for the Alta project here, condors presented a problem. Since the species nearly went extinct three decades ago, a captive-breeding program has rebuilt the wild population to 290 birds in the United States and Mexico. As the Southern Californian flock has grown, its range has expanded northeast from the coastal mountains to the Tehachapis and the Southern Sierra Nevada, putting the birds ever closer to wind farms that have sprouted here since the 1980s. While lead poisoning remains the primary threat to recovery, the possibility of
