CONDOR PROJECT BREEDS SUCCESS; BIOLOGISTS PERFECTING PROGRAM TO RESTORE POPULATION OF MAJESTIC BIRDS IN WEST.

Byline: Scott Allen The Boston Globe

``One wing in the grave.''

In the words of one researcher, that's how close the California condor came to extinction. The biggest birds in North America, once common throughout the West, lost their last nesting female in the wild in 1986 when she died of lead poisoning.

Thirteen years later, 100 dignitaries, including a congressman and a Hollywood actor, shivered on a windy ridge high above the Pacific Ocean to witness something that once seemed impossible: the return of condors to the wild.

Seven immature condors, raised at the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos, cautiously hopped out of a pen late last month, then pumped their enormous black wings and took their first free flight as the crowd watched through binoculars.

``It's like riding your bicycle for the first time,'' beamed Jim Davis, executive director of the Ventana Wilderness Society, the private group that owns the rocky hillside south of Monterey where the condors were released.

Behind that remarkable scene lies one of the most dramatic, and controversial, wildlife gambles in history. Over the objection of environmentalists, wildlife biologists trapped the last wild California condors in 1987, bringing the entire species into zoos for safekeeping.

Since then, biologists have held the fate of one of the oldest animal species on the continent in their hands. Zoo and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service workers have reared scores of condors from the day they hatched, using facilities such as the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in northern Ventura County to help train the birds to avoid the evils of the world, such as houses, power lines and, of course, people.

Now, after years of skepticism, bird deaths, and some condors who behaved more like dogs than wild animals, biologists seem to be perfecting their condor assembly line. Fifty condors now live in remote areas of California and Arizona, with six more birds scheduled for release this month.

But the condor comeback is far from assured. None of the wild birds is old enough to mate and all depend on people to supply at least some food, requiring field workers to carry 100-pound carcasses into the wilderness under cover of dark. Moreover, the condors still face many of the hazards that plagued them before, such as lead poisoning from ingesting bullets in the remains of hunters' kills.

However, the burgeoning success of the California Condor Recovery Program is winning credibility for captive breeding, an approach to saving endangered species that was once considered dangerous meddling with nature. It turns out, if biologists have enough time and resources, they can become surrogate parents even to smart animals like condors.

``We do not advocate captive breeding and release for all situations,'' said Mike Wallace, a pioneer of the condor program now at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. ``It's expensive. It's time consuming, and Murphy's Law (whatever can go wrong will go wrong) works overtime.''

But, in the mountains of California at least, it's working.

Condors have been soaring over canyons and gorges for millennia, effortlessly riding the columns of warm air on wings that stretch up to 11 feet from tip to tip. Before the last ice age 10,000 years ago, condors ranged over much of what is now the western United States as well as New York and Florida, feeding on the carcasses of sabre-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths and other extinct ``mega-fauna.''

As condors retreated to increasingly smaller areas of California in this century, some researchers wrote them off as living fossils, doomed like the other big animals of the Pleistocene Period. Paleontologist Loye Miller described them as ``a species with one foot and even one wing in the grave.''

But condor biologists regard Miller's view as a profound error.

``They're not an Ice Age relic. It was just a nice thing to say . . . so that people wouldn't have to feel guilty,'' said Kelly Sorenson, ornithologist at the Ventana Wilderness Society.

The young condors under Sorenson's care look more like undertakers than relics as they gather around a dead calf near Big Sur, their bald heads bowed and wings folded respectfully behind their backs. As they mature, their black heads will turn orange, and a circling of them in the sky will tell the world that something has died.

These birds, released a year ago, are oblivious to the extraordinary human effort that made their dinner possible, from the field workers watching in the grove below to the rancher who donated the stillborn calf to the 30-year recovery effort that has cost more than $25 million. They're just doing what condors have done since the Pleistocene Period, feasting on the dead.

``It's a service to all humans, really. Those carcasses . . . can harbor disease and the scavengers come out there and clean it up,'' said Sorenson as he watched the five birds eat. ``They're tough.''

Unfortunately, the condors' diet has played a major role in their decline, even after governments cracked down on shooting the animals in the early 1900s. Given the chance, condors will eat sewage, puddles of anti-freeze or lead-tainted animal guts, sometimes overwhelming their immune system.

By 1982, the condors' decline had grown so serious that three chicks were brought into the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos for safekeeping and the remaining 24 wild condors were watched constantly by biologists from public and private conservation organizations.

Janet Hamber, condor biologist at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, said biologists didn't plan to bring all the condors into captivity, hoping instead to use the zoos to supplement the condor population. But events overtook them when six of the remaining wild birds, including the female of the last breeding couple, died in a single winter.

Environmentalists sued to stop the round-up, questioning the zoos' ability to care for the condors. They noted that the Los Angeles Zoo had inappropriately put some of the captive condors on display, making them too tame to be released to the wild.

But the Wildlife Service won court approval to capture the condors and, by 1987, the California condor species consisted of 27 birds in two California zoos.

It turned out that keeping condors in the zoo is fairly easy - condors can be trained like a dog - but preparing them for release to the wild is hard, largely because the birds need so much guidance.

Young condors in the wild stay with their parents for several years, but biologists couldn't afford the luxury of parent-rearing for most of the birds. Instead, they removed the eggs as soon as they were laid in hopes that the female would lay another fertile egg, a practice known as ``double clutching.''

Consequently, caretakers had to raise most of the birds themselves, and, to avoid taming the animals, do it without direct contact. The sign in the condor nursery at the Los Angeles Zoo, reads, ``No talking. No whispering. No exceptions.'' Caretakers remain behind a dark curtain, using a condor puppet to preen the chicks, play with them and generally keep them company.

In October 1991, two California condors were helicoptered from the Los Angeles Zoo to the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in Ventura County, where they began a year-long orientation of life in the wild. In 1992, shortly after his release, one of that first pair died after drinking from a puddle containing anti-freeze.

Six other condors were released in December 1992, and in the months that followed - as the young birds explored populated areas outside Sespe - four were electrocuted when they either flew into or tried to roost on utility lines.

By late 1993, all 13 condors that had been released to the wild were either dead or recaptured because they were not wary enough of people, and biologists knew they had to better prepare the birds for life among human hazards.

That's when the biologists turned to the avian equivalent of shock therapy. Under what became known as ``aversion training,'' biologists placed utility poles in the birds' flight pens that carried a shock strong enough to hurt, but not to harm. Likewise, they electrified roofs of small buildings to discourage roosting on houses.

In addition, biologists made the birds' contacts with humans into negative experiences, sometimes shouting and menacing them when they entered the cage to take blood or move the birds. When soon-to-be-released birds were fitted with radio transmitters at the Los Angeles Zoo recently, Wallace kept them in small kennels all day just so they would fear people more.

Even those precautions weren't enough as condor rearing expanded. Four birds raised at a new Fish and Wildlife Service facility had to be recaptured in 1996 because they kept roosting on roofs, and one, nicknamed Walter, liked to visit the office of a Big Sur resort.

As a result, Sorenson now insists on an older ``mentor'' condor to stay with the young birds for the last few weeks before they are released.

Today, the condor program is working as the biologists had hoped, and environmental groups such as the Golden Gate chapter of the National Audubon Society support the program again. At five sites in California and Arizona, condors are flying free, including some in the Los Padres National Forest north of Los Angeles that may be old enough to mate next year.

The Wildlife Service is still well short of its goal of 150 condors in both California and Arizona, but the wild population is back to mid-1960s levels and rising. The biggest remaining obstacle for the biologists is the replacement of lead in bullets and shot with a less toxic metal.

As a result, there was an atmosphere of celebration at Big Sur on Jan. 30 as a long convoy of vehicles drove an hour and a half up a steep mountain road for the condors' release. Even U.S. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Monterey, hobbling on a broken ankle, and actor Timothy Bottoms jumped at the chance to see some of the rarest animals on the planet.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color) The program to breed condors in captivity has led to the release of more than 50 birds in California and Arizona.

(2--Color) Scores of condors have been born in captivity, such as this week-old chick with its mother.

Associated Press