SPECIAL REPORT / Bouncing back from near-extinction, these giant birds may be about to reproduce in the wild. But experts see . . . Condors Flying High, but Not Out of Danger

VENTURA —  Sixteen years after nearly becoming extinct, California condors are making a surprisingly strong comeback, expanding their numbers and their range far beyond the Ventura County back country where the ambitious experiment to rescue them began.

Scientists credit new chick rearing and release strategies for enabling the birds to wing their way back from the brink of annihilation.

In the past decade, the California condor population has increased fivefold, to 150 birds. A record 20 chicks were hatched this year at captive breeding sites at the Los Angeles Zoo, San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Boise, Idaho-based World Center for Birds of Prey.

“We’re at a pivotal point as far as the condor recovery program is concerned,” said Robert Mesta, a federal biologist who coordinates the program at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service headquarters for condor recovery in Ventura. “They’re moving back into their historical range, finding food on their own and exhibiting some breeding behavior.”

Even the strongest doubters, who several years ago feared that recovery was too late and the species doomed, are amazed at the turnaround. Scientists are increasingly optimistic that the giant carrion-feeders with the 10-foot wingspans have a chance to reclaim the skies over California and to become established in other Western states.

“I was pretty pessimistic about saving condors in California because there’s too many human activities going on there,” said Lloyd F. Kiff, science director for the Peregrine Fund, a nonprofit group that breeds condors in Idaho. “It’s been a fairly incredible recovery. It’s far better than I thought it could be.”

Of course, with only 150 left on the planet, the California condor population is still not robust enough to shed endangered species status. Condors remain one of the world’s rarest and most imperiled birds. Wild populations are still small enough to be vulnerable to disease, poaching and predators, according to scientists.

Although just 35 California condors live in the wild today, the oldest are beginning to show courtship behavior, leading scientists to hope that they will soon reproduce in the wild, the critical step on the road to recovery.

Condors are relics, one of the last giant animals from the days when woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers roamed America the continent. Condor fossils have been found from New York to Texas, the La Brea tar pits to Florida. Though they resemble giant buzzards, scientists say they are related to storks.

Hundreds of the great birds once traversed mountain ranges from Lake Casitas to Lake Tahoe, feeding on piles of deer guts and dead livestock, but they disappeared from the skies in 1987 when six remaining wild birds were captured and sent to the Los Angeles Zoo for breeding.

An initial attempt to reintroduce the species to the wild five years later at the Sespe Condor Sanctuary near Fillmore failed when five birds crashed into power lines and died. The survivors were returned to the zoo to replenish their numbers.

Serious concern remains over whether Southern California, historically a condor stronghold, is the best place to reestablish the bird. Although numbers of wild birds are expanding, long-term prospects are questionable as civilization encroaches deeper into wild lands and brings with it pollution and other manmade hazards. Consequently, federal biologists are planting new condor colonies farther from Southern California.

“We’re doing an atrocious job of protecting large tracts of viable habitats in California. How does that bode in the long haul for the condor? Not very well,” said Kimball L. Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

And the cost of the program, $25 million and counting, has made the condor a target for critics of the Endangered Species Act. It costs about $2,000 annually to feed each of the adult birds, Kiff said, which strains the government’s ability to sustain the recovery. Private groups--including the Peregrine Fund and the Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary, which manages Big Sur condors--are increasingly being asked to carry more of the load.

Nonetheless, after years of fits and starts, the future is looking brighter for the condor. Scientists say El Nino’s moist weather may have enabled the birds to mate two months longer than normal, producing the record brood of 20 chicks.

The birds also have finally gained a foothold in their native habitat. Sixteen soar on thermal gusts over remote canyons of the Los Padres National Forest. Five cruise the hills above Big Sur. Fourteen were set free northeast of the Grand Canyon last year. The rest remain in captivity, some as a brood stock, some awaiting release.

In the next three months, 22 juvenile condors will be released--the most ever in a season--with the first group of nine scheduled to be turned loose Nov. 18 at Hurricane Cliffs near Page, Ariz. The rest will be set free in California in January, Mesta said.

By the end of winter, 57 condors will are expected to be living in the wild, a 63% increase over today’s numbers. It has been 60 years since that many California condors were flying free.

And condors the birds are surviving longer in the wild, scientists say. Whereas half the condors released at the Sespe sanctuary in 1992-93 perished, one in five birds released elsewhere between 1995 and 1997 died, Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Jane Hendron said. The primary threats to wild condors are vandals who shoot them, power lines and attacks from other birds of prey, principally golden eagles.

Mortality may be down, but critics say that’s because the birds are carefully controlled in the outdoors. Field crews follow all the condors, monitoring their every move every day of the year. They leave them food, shoo them from hazards and rough them up during routine handling to reinforce fear of humans.

“It’s kind of artificial, sort of captivity without walls. There’s still a long way to go,” said Mark Palmer, program director for the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute.

Clumsy Attempts at Mating

Nevertheless, Mesta said 5-year-old condors in the wild are growing up and starting to act like true wild animals. They are finding their own food and flying farther from the spots where they were released.

Now, scientists say condors are approaching a crossroads that will determine whether they can breed and thrive in nature. For the first time, scientists have observed classic condor courtship behavior in the wild--in two pairs of wild birds living in the Santa Barbara County back country.

“When they get the first reproduction in the wild, that’s an important turning point. It’ll be almost like they’ll be home free,” Garrett said.

Last December, a condor identified as 07 sauntered up to lady condor 08, bobbing his head, spreading his wings and making a clumsy attempt to mate with her. Male 00 cq made a similar pass at another female. Because condors don’t mate until about age six 6, researchers hope the courtship displays last year culminate in breeding next year.

“I thought they were going to disappear from the face of the earth in the 1970s,” said Brian Walton, director of the Predatory Bird Research Group at the University of California, UC Santa Cruz. “If you told anyone in the ‘60s we would be looking at 150 condors, a large successful breeding program and birds in several states, they never would have believed it.”

Condors are the largest bird in North America. They glide on warm-air gusts that carry them like freeways over mountain ranges at 55 miles per hour, covering 300 miles in a day. An Arizona condor recently was spotted at Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming. California birds are making nonstop flights from the San Luis Obispo County back country south past Reyes Peak in Ventura County into the Tehachapi Mountains and north to Tulare County. Mesta said it is a sure sign they are foraging for food and recolonizing their historic range.

For the intrepid, willing to brave steep canyons where condors live, the experience of encountering a wild condor is unforgettable, said Reed Smith, a bird-watcher from Oxnard. He recently came upon one near Mt. Pinos, north of Ojai.

“Have you ever seen a [military] C-5 cargo plane? Condors are like the C-5s of birds,” Smith said. “It’s awesome to see something that large moving so fast. I was on a cliff, and a female rode a thermal right up the face of the cliff not 30 feet in front of me. I was amazed. To me, it was hard to understand the need to preserve the species until I experienced it. After that, there was no question.”

The future for condors, however, may reside far from Southern California. Even as the birds are coming back, federal wildlife officials are deliberately moving them away from urban centers. California may be the condors’ historical home, but development is fouling their nest.

“These mountain ridges in California have historically been good flight routes and they still are, only today the ridges are covered in houses,” Mesta said. “Fifty years ago there was nothing there. It was condor country. Now people are there.”

More Birds in the Wild

Fourteen condors have been released in northern Arizona since 1996. In mid-January, six birds are tentatively scheduled for release at the 100,000-acre Wind Wolves Preserve near Maricopa in Kern County. The Fish and Wildlife Service has asked the Turner Endangered Species Fund for permission to release condors at two sprawling ranches CNN magnate Ted Turner owns in southern New Mexico.

Negotiations are under way with Mexican officials to transplant condors to Baja California. In Northern California, Mesta said the condor recovery team is looking at a potential release site in the forests east of Red Bluff in Tehama County.

“You can just watch the release sites moving away from the Los Angeles area,” Garrett said.

Mesta defends the strategy on the grounds that condors were once a transcontinental species. “To be successful, we’re going to have to put a lot of birds out over a very wide area,” Mesta said.