Developer Wants to Ease Condor Rules

The Tejon Ranch Co. has applied for a federal permit to protect developers if they accidentally harm or kill the endangered California condor by building three projects on the vast ranch north of Los Angeles.

Tejon Ranch is seeking an “incidental take” permit, which would allow the developer to “harm, harass, trap, shoot or kill” North America’s largest bird during or after planned construction of a 23,000-home residential project, a 1,450-acre warehouse park and a mountain resort community along Interstate 5 in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Ranch officials and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are set to jointly explain the proposal at a public meeting in Frazier Park today. The permit process could be complete by late this year, officials said.

“The misconception is that this permit would allow for the killing of the bird,” said biologist Rick Farris, a division chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Ventura. “What this permit does is allow them to conduct their lawful activities and assure that what they’re doing is not going to cause the extinction of the species.”

If the notoriously curious and sometimes destructive condors are drawn to the new developments near their Tejon habitat, ranch officials and the wildlife service have crafted plans to deal with them, Farris said. They include having a biologist on the ranch to frighten away the birds if they land on houses or swoop into backyards to swallow debris.

But environmental groups and local residents -- notified of the proposal in a June 25 posting in the Federal Register -- are rallying to oppose the permit.

“Giving a permit to harass, harm or kill California condors really goes against all the work being done to turn around the fate of that species,” said Kerri Camalo of Defenders of Wildlife, a national group.

“It seems an affront to the people who have spent so much time and taxpayers’ money to keep this species from becoming extinct,” she said. “Now we’d allow the few condors alive in the wild to be taken in the name of development.”

Ninety-nine of the rare condors live in the wild, including 49 in California, after a 25-year, $35-million effort to save the bird from extinction. An additional 149 are in captivity.

“Actually, I’m a little concerned about this,” said Jesse Grantham, interim coordinator of the government’s condor recovery program.

“This is sort of a collision between wildlife and humans,” he said. “How do we deal with an animal that can cover great distances and needs significant space to survive? The condor is a flagship species, and the flags are flying everywhere.”

The 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch -- a prized wildlife habitat that stretches 40 miles from north to south and 21 miles across -- is a favorite feeding and resting spot for California condors. Indeed, the last condor taken into captivity, in 1987, in an effort to save the species was captured at Tejon Ranch.

The birds now migrate from as far away as Big Sur and from nests in the mountains above Fillmore to hang out along wind-swept ridgelines at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. They love to soar with the afternoon zephyrs, experts say.

But just a few miles from those ridgelines, the Tejon Ranch resort community is planned. Authorities fear it would attract the big birds because of its high elevation in the mountains that make up the ranch’s rugged backbone.

Tejon Ranch general counsel Dennis Mullins said Monday that the company had worked with federal officials for more than 10 years to come up with ways to assure that condors and the development can safely coexist.

“We’re going to do good things for the condor,” Mullins said. “We asked in 1992, when the condors were being reintroduced to the wild, how Tejon Ranch could help the condor recovery program without impairing its property rights.”

Federal officials and the development firm came up with a set of guidelines for where and how dwellings can be built, and a series of options on how to deal with condor problems if they develop.

Tejon Ranch has agreed with recommendations to ban buildings along ridgelines, because they would attract the birds. Strict limits would also be placed on height for the same reason. And the design of backyards would be altered so they won’t lure the big birds.

“But there is the potential that condors will start hanging around the houses; they’ve done it in the past,” said Farris of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “When they do that we have to change their behavior. That may even involve removing them from the wild and putting them back in captivity. Although it wouldn’t necessarily kill them, we’re saying they would be ecologically dead in terms of their ability to contribute to the population.”

This afternoon’s meetings -- at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. at Cuddy Hall in Frazier Park -- are the first public parts of an environmental review process that Farris said he began in 1998, and will lead to the release this fall of two related analyses on the effect of development on Tejon Ranch.

The “incidental take” permit is a required part of a so-called habitat conservation plan being prepared jointly by Tejon Ranch and the Fish and Wildlife Service. The federal Endangered Species Act requires an evaluation of a project if the development site is important as a habitat of an endangered species.

Because of its size, location and variety of wildlife, many experts consider Tejon Ranch as perhaps the most environmentally important undeveloped stretch of land in California. Ranch owners offered last year to sell 100,000 acres to an environmental trust, a proposal that is still pending.

“We have a responsibility to process this [application] to the best of our ability,” Farris said. “At a later time, we’ll make a decision on whether this is something we should be doing, or not.”

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Times staff writer Deborah Schoch contributed to this report.