CONDORS RETURNED TO ARIZONA SKIES : 6 RELEASED IN REPOPULATION PROJECT.

Byline: Jerry Nachtigal Associated Press

For the first time in 72 years, the largest and rarest bird in North America took flight over Arizona's red cliffs and canyons Thursday in an effort by scientists to bring California condors back from the brink.

For thousands of years, condors flew over these craggy sandstone cliffs and fed on carcasses of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Then hunters and other hazards of humankind pushed them to near extinction.

Twenty condors now survive in the wild in California since a captive breeding program began in the 1980s, and the government wants to establish a second wild population in northern Arizona.

Following a countdown led by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on Thursday, a biologist atop the 1,000-foot cliffs opened a pen on a rocky ledge where six young condors have lived since Oct. 29.

The baldheaded fledglings walked out a few minutes apart and surveyed their surroundings to the cheers of 500 bird watchers below. Ten minutes later, one condor turned into the wind and lifted its 9-foot wings, flapping awkwardly to a ledge 50 yards away. The crowd let out a whoop.

The rest, all 6- to 7-months old and weighing about 20 pounds, soon followed with short aerial spurts among the rocks and junipers. None immediately ventured off the cliffs that their ancestors inhabited since the Ice Age.

``I'm standing here trying not to cry,'' said Robert Mesta, condor program coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ``We couldn't have sculpted it any better - birds flying, sun shining, blue sky.''

Biologists, schoolchildren and others peered through binoculars on an open plain below.

``They're just learning to use their wings and how to fly at this point, so they'll probably stay pretty close to the cliffs the first few weeks as they take their initial flights,'' said Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Jeff Humphrey.

Minutes before they were freed, Navajo medicine man Jones Benally said a prayer.

``They are back where they belong,'' he said, referring to the canyons beneath the cliffs, where drawings of the birds made by the ancient Anasazi tribe can be found. Scientists say condor bones found in a nearby cave are 11,000 years old.

``They were here a long time - we have come full circle,'' Benally said.

The young birds spent the past six weeks getting used to their new surroundings, testing their wings in a spacious pen and feasting on calf carcasses.

The birds are equipped with radio transmitters and wing tags so scientists can track them. They're the first captive condors released outside of California, and the first to have been raised by their parents, rather than by humans using ``condor puppets.'' They have come into contact with humans only twice, and biologists hope they'll be naturally people-shy in the wild.

Five were hatched and reared last summer at the Los Angeles Zoo, and the sixth came from the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho.

Humans shot, poached and poisoned California condors until only nine birds remained by 1985, with none left in the wild by 1987.

A decade of captive breeding has brought the number of condors up to about 120. The first condors were released in the coastal mountains of Central California in 1992, with several other releases since then.

The birds, whose adult wingspans can reach 12 feet, may have more luck in Arizona than California, where some of the previously released condors have died after coming into contact with power lines, antifreeze and other man-made hazards.

Here, they can ride the warm air above hundreds of thousands of acres of sparsely populated federal park preserves. To the north is the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. To the south is the Grand Canyon.

``With food placement, we can control where the birds are going to be roosting and calling home,'' Humphrey said. ``Eventually they'll learn to watch the ravens and coyotes feeding on these carcasses and learn from the air to associate these animals with carcasses in the wild.''

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PHOTO A juvenile California condor tests its new freedom Thursday at the Vermillion Cliffs in northern Arizona.

Associated Press