BREEDING PROGRAM TAKES WING : FEDERAL PROJECT RETURNING CONDORS TO CALIFORNIA SKIES.

Byline: James Bruggers Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Wildlife biologist Jorie Moran has experienced what many outdoors types can only hope for being buzzed by a giant California condor.

She's monitoring 16 condors that were reintroduced to the mountains north of Los Angeles.

``You hear the wind whistling through their wings,'' she says from a grassy pasture in the Sierra Madre. ``It's so cool.''

By January, four of these large scavengers should be living in Monterey County and soaring above Northern California for the first time in two decades. If all goes well, in six years these extremely endangered animals could become the first breeding colony in Northern California since about 1910.

Federal biologists are bringing the big babies to the rugged Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur. These relics of the Pleistocene Epoch can fly 150 miles a day on the strength of their 9-foot wingspan.

``It would be a big day,'' says Frank Strehlitz, executive vice president of the Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary, the conservation group taking on the Monterey County project. ``One flew over Palo Alto in 1972. It was a big day, then.''

After a controversial beginning and well publicized setbacks, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Condor Recovery Program is on a roll. Sixteen of 17 condors that biologists have reintroduced in Southern California during the past 1-1/2 years are alive and well. A bird that disappeared last in August may have perished in a wildfire.

This fall, authorities hope to start a second colony when they release six young condors to the red rock canyon country of southern Utah.

``Their downfall happened when European man hit town, and with the western migration of Americans,'' says Dave Clendenen, a Fish and Wildlife senior biologist in Ventura. ``We have a moral obligation to do what we can to bring them back.''

California condors are among the rarest birds on Earth.

Their heyday was a million years ago, when they ranged over coastal North America. They gorged on the remains of woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, mastodons and camels.

The condors managed to hang on long after the continent's ancient mega fauna died off about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the latest ice age.

``It has been an epic struggle on its part to survive,'' says Strehlitz, a Concord resident. ``They haven't gotten any real help from us until recently.''

While American Indians considered condors sacred, European settlers shot and killed the birds. The new Americans took and sold their large eggs. They poisoned their food and bodies.

By 1800, the California condor was limited to the West Coast. A century later, it was confined to Southern California, though condors occasionally ventured into Northern California.

By the late 1930s, the population was at 60 to 100 birds and falling. Tragedy struck in 1985, when six condors disappeared, another died of lead poisoning, and one more was found with extremely high lead concentrations in its body.

In a bold, controversial move, federal biologists began capturing all remaining wild condors in an effort to save the species. Just 27 remained.

It was only the third occasion in which federal authorities have taken such a drastic and last-resort step to save a wildlife species.

``Nobody at that point knew whether they'd ever be able to put condors back in the wild,'' Strehlitz says. They didn't even know whether the birds would breed in captivity. ``But the other option was to simply let the birds go extinct.''

Captive breeding proved to be a success beyond anyone's expectations. By 1992, the population topped 60 birds at the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos, and the Fish and Wildlife Service began releasing the offspring back into the mountains outside Los Angeles.

Success, however, quickly turned to setback.

Four of 19 birds the agency released from between 1992 and 1995 were electrocuted after landing on power poles. Another drank antifreeze and died. One more died of cancer. Some of the birds were feeding from trash bins behind burger joints; others were raiding campgrounds.

``Due to the artificial environment those guys were reared in, this was natural for them,'' Clendenen says.

But picking through human garbage could not have been what Mother Nature had intended for the California condor, so biologists rounded up the remaining birds from the wild and put them back in zoos for their own safety.

Condors are curious and fearless, says Moran, the field biologist.

``They check out things that are different. That's how they've gotten into trouble.''

The tide began to turn in 1995, when the recovery program began releasing a new generation of young birds. Some had been raised by their parents instead of people using puppets. Others spent their early months at the remote Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge outside Ventura, far away from the city sounds of breeding centers at the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos.

The birds were trained to stay away from power poles. Biologists also attempted to make them wary of humans. They chased the youngsters around a pen, turning them on their backs.

Nevertheless, some ventured into campgrounds and a Tehachapi resident's back yard. Biologists have decided the hazing did not work and are rethinking its use.

But scientists are encouraged because all but one of the condors released since early 1995 are still alive. The population now stands at 120, including the 16 in the wild.

``I think we are on the road to recovery,'' Clendenen says. ``High mortality was the reason the birds were going down the tubes in the first place.''

The road to recovery, however, is a rocky path. It involves nearly unprecedented help by people and $1 million a year in public and private funding. It requires hard work and long hours by low-paid field biologists and volunteers who act as condor baby sitters.

``A couple of days, they buzzed us early,'' says Moran, who works at the Lion Canyon release site in Santa Barbara County. ``It's 7 a.m., and you are just going to the outhouse, and then they fly right over your head. ... You say, `My gosh, I guess my day is starting early.'''

Biologists selected Lion Canyon and another Southern California spot, Castle Crags, because of their remoteness in the Los Padres National Forest. It takes four hours to drive to Lion Canyon from agency offices in Ventura, the last two on a winding dirt road through chaparral, scrub oak, junipers and pines.

Grazing cattle and deer share huge swaths of grasslands that turn bright yellow by late summer and contrast sharply with a deep blue sky.

Moran spends hours on end sitting in a tiny, enclosed blind where the temperature inside tops 105 degrees. She watches condors eat on sandstone slabs and roost on pine branches. For seven days at a time, she shares a small travel trailer with at least one other staff biologist and often a volunteer or two.

Using spotting scopes and radio telemetry, she tracks the birds' every move. If they take to the air, she hops in a truck and goes on a hot pursuit.

``You end up doing a lot of driving, chasing birds around, that's for sure,'' says Martin Ruane, another field biologist.

Every few days, the field staff feeds the condors stillborn calf carcasses from Southern California ranches. Sometimes they haul the 70-pound dead animals out to the feeding area in the early morning. Other times, they do the chore at night.

Supplemental feeding will go on indefinitely to make sure the condors have the best possible food to eat, Clendenen says. A dead beef cow from a ranch might contain hormones or other chemicals that could make the condors sick. Other animals, such as deer, might have been shot with bullets containing lead, a deadly poison to the condors.

``All it takes is a lead fragment the size of a fingernail clipping to kill a bird,'' Clendenen says.

At Hopper Mountain, high above the Pacific Ocean, eight young condors sun themselves outside simulated rock nesting caves built inside protective cages. The accommodations look a little like an adobe-style motel in Santa Fe.

A warm wind rushes through heritage oaks and a large grove of native walnuts.

Four of these birds are bound for Monterey County and the Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary.

Though just 5 months old, their wingspans stretch nearly 9 feet. As one extends both wings, its long flight feathers hang down, giving the appearance of a vampire's black cape. Fluffy gray feathers ring its naked gray neck like a scarf.

The birds hop from stick to rock, grunting, groaning and occasionally hissing.

They turn their heads quickly from side to side. One looks upward, its large eyes spying a hawk overhead.

This is a face only a mother can love.

``They may not be attractive,'' says Jane Hendron, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman. ``They are not cute and cuddly, but they have a lot of interesting characteristics. Just the idea that this animal existed when you had woolly mammoths and mastodons roaming the Earth.''

In the Ventana Wilderness Sanctuary, staff and volunteers are converting what had been a bald eagle release site into one for condors. They cleared a road and trails of fallen trees. They towed in three travel trailers and demolished the 80-foot-tall platform that had been used to house young eagles before their flights to freedom.

The four young condors should arrive in December and be set free in early January.

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Photo

Photo: Jane Hedron compares her arm to the length of a Cali fornia condor's primary feather.

Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service