4 Andean Condors Will Stand In for California Cousins

Four Andean condors will be snapped into airline-type animal cages in San Diego and Los Angeles tonight and driven to a cliff in Ventura County to begin their transition to life in the wild.

The journey marks the beginning of an experiment aimed at answering dozens of questions about how to perform the crucial task, still ahead, of releasing the last remaining California condors, now being raised in zoos, into their native habitat.

Months of back-breaking work went into preparing the site 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles for the Andean condors. By the time the test is over and the birds are recaptured in two to three years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expects to have spent at least $440,000 on the program.

The Andean condor release is yet another building block in the federal program for rescuing the California condor from extinction.

“It’s a palpable excitement among everyone who’s been involved in this process,” said Joseph J. Dowhan, in charge of the condor recovery program for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “When you consider all the process we went through, I think it’s a pretty amazing thing that we have come to this day.”

The 28 California condors at zoos in Los Angeles and San Diego are the remnants of a species that once ranged all along the North American Coast. Their numbers had declined to 40, all in California, by 1976, and the federal government embarked on an ambitious effort to stop the decline. At least $20 million has been spent so far.

In a program that has seen controversy almost every step of the way, the Fish and Wildlife Service captured the last condor in the wild in 1987. But, even as the first captive-bred chick hatched this spring, officials knew they had to improve techniques for teaching such captive-bred young to survive in the wild.

It is into that grand plan that tonight’s transfer of the Andean condor fits.

With their cages swathed in covers to keep them from glimpsing the human world, two female Andean condors about 4 months old will be driven from the San Diego Wild Animal Park to a rendezvous at the Los Angeles Zoo with the two other juvenile birds and their escorts, said Don Sterner, lead condor keeper at the San Diego park.

One bird was hatched at the Los Angeles Zoo and one was hatched and reared by its parents at the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md. It will be flown to Los Angeles this morning. Both are also female.

The caravan will then wind its way into the rugged back country of the Los Padres National Forest, to a site located among nearly 60,000 acres that includes the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, the Los Padres Forest’s Sespe Condor Sanctuary and land owned by the Nature Conservancy, all within the former range of the California condor. However, officials will not be specific about its location because they fear that the birds might be disturbed or harmed.

“It’s a very sensitive project, from the birds’ standpoint,” Dowhan said. “These are young birds that are subject to stress. It’s for the security of the birds.”

Young enough that their feathers are just beginning to grow, the 15-pound birds will spend the next four months getting accustomed to each other and their new surroundings, a complex of caves in the side of a cliff, said Mike Wallace, the L.A. Zoo’s bird curator and the biologist in charge of the research project.

Netting supported by cables suspended from the rock will keep the birds inside the enclosure until they are ready for release sometime in December, Wallace said.

In the meantime, scientists will be able to observe them through one-way glass that looks into one section of the enclosure and with a solar-powered video system.

“They work out their differences, but it’s a tricky period. I’ll probably be sleeping up there for a couple of days watching how things go,” Wallace said.

A second pen--which may be used as early as October for a second set of three or four Andeans--sits 10 feet above the ground, suspended from 15 telephone poles.

“The idea is to give us some distance between the birds and the bears, which also like carrion and will be attracted to the area at night,” he said.

Once the birds are released from the pen, the researchers will have to gradually coax them into learning all of the basics of surviving in the wild. They will need to learn to fly, to search for food instead of waiting for it to appear at a regular feeding site and to compete with other scavengers.

The pitfalls were demonstrated in the early 1980s in Peru, where Wallace and Stanley A. Temple of the University of Wisconsin released 11 Andean condors over three years.

One bird died when it apparently flew into a cliff. The birds required a backup food source even after they had begun searching out food. One starved because it was so submissive that other carrion eaters wouldn’t allow it to eat. In all, four out of 11 birds died.

This experiment, too, could result in some deaths among the 10 to 20 birds that will be released this year and next, Dowhan said.

“We’re confident that this is a hardy species that, with all the support we’re offering, can survive in the wild,” he said.

It is for that reason that the release and adaptation techniques are being tested on Andean condors, which survive in their native South American habitat and have been bred successfully in U.S. zoos for years. With only 28 California condors known to be alive, researchers hope to keep to a minimum the numbers lost during its planned reintroduction. Release of California condors could come as early as 1992.

Andean condors are seen as a good surrogate species for the experiment because they are similar in habits to California condors. At about 20 pounds, the female Andeans are about the same size as California condors and have a wingspan of about 9 feet.

Why not simply introduce the more plentiful Andeans into the former California condor range?

To do so would go against a basic principle of wildlife biology, that of keeping ecosystems as close to the way nature intended as possible, Dowhan said. Although the Andean and California condors may have a common ancestor, they evolved separately and in completely different areas, he noted.