She Just Adores the Little Stinkers : Ecology: Workers at the L.A. Zoo are seeking to ensure the survival of the condor. It’s a dirty but loving job, and the hatching of an egg is a special event.

Their smell is repugnant. They consider dead rats a breakfast treat. And whenever they feel the least bit stressed, the first thing they do is throw up.

But, oh, when they hatch . . .

“There is nothing like it in the world,” Susie Kasielka says fondly. “It’s like seeing everything you’ve ever worked for come to fruition.”

Tucked into the chaparral-covered hills of Griffith Park, Kasielka and 13 other scientists and caretakers from the Los Angeles Zoo are working to undo one of mankind’s most terrible deeds, the near-extermination of the California condor.

And this year, after more than a decade of struggle to revive a prehistoric species that not long ago was reduced to a single breeding pair, it appears that the condor recovery program may be successful enough to return a few chicks to the wild.

The fifth condor egg since January was laid at the Los Angeles Zoo on Saturday, and a sixth appears to be on the way. The precious eggs, along with three others laid by condors at the San Diego Zoo, are more than twice the number produced during the breeding season last year, leading Kasielka and others to believe that they must be doing something right.

“We take the most extreme degree of care we can. We scrub our hands with disinfectant until they are raw,” Kasielka said. “We would do almost anything for the betterment of this species. We are pretty privileged to be in this position.”

Eleven thousand years ago, the California condor soared with abandon over much of the United States and survived the prehistoric die-off that made other species, like the giant ground sloth and the saber-toothed cat, extinct.

Today, thanks to poachers, pollution, the destruction of habitats and lead poisoning from ingesting the shot in hunters’ uncollected prey, there are just 40 California condors left--19 in Los Angeles and 21 in San Diego. Not a single one exists in the wild.

What the public sees of the mammoth vulture-like bird’s historic rebirth is little more than a graphic exhibit on one of the Los Angeles Zoo’s winding roads, a portrait of the orange-headed creature with its 9 1/2-foot wingspan and the tragic story of its near-demise.

The real work goes on in the isolation of the foothills of Griffith Park, where 12 flying pens--each more than twice the size of Kasielka’s two-bedroom Pasadena home--are stocked with everything a condor couple could want to take care of the business at hand: breeding.

Only Kasielka, head curator Michael Wallace, six condor keepers, two veterinarians and four technicians are allowed near the fragile flock, isolated and quarantined to keep the eggs coming and the chicks alive.

These caretakers deposit carrion in dark chutes, preen the chicks and teach them social skills with arm puppets that look like adult condors. They chase them through mud and the remains of dead rodents when it’s time for yearly physicals and sit for hours observing their nesting patterns and personality quirks.

The team rejoiced after the birth last year of Kareya, hatched in a sort of Cesarean birth at 4:30 one morning, and mourned the death of one of the last female condors from the wild, which died of lead poisoning after veterinarians lost a days-long battle to save her.

“Condor babies are messy babies,” Kasielka says. “They always have gook on their feet, they eat dead stuff, they are real slobs. But emotionally, you can’t help but be attached to such highly intelligent, highly social animals.”

The caretakers “live and breathe condors,” but the birds scarcely know it. With closed-circuit monitors and hidden microphones, they accomplish most of their work out of the sight of their charges, who have been known to imprint with humans, even grow up believing they are human.

“The first time they see us, if we’ve done our jobs right, they are terrified, “ Kasielka said. “We are their worst nightmare.”

Their nightmare and their salvation.

The challenge now is to teach both the condors and mankind to live together. Once released in a protected area of the Los Padres National Forest, the birds must be taught to forage in the rugged mountainous areas for food set out by caretakers, rather than search the lower grassy plains, where they might fall prey to hunters, power lines or carcasses of animals killed by lead ammunition.

As for man’s part, utility companies have agreed to lay power lines underground in key condor flight areas and research is being done into non-lead ammunition, Kasielka said.

The highest goal--for the California condor to fly once more in the wild, unmanaged by man--remains decades away, experts say. For now, it will be success enough to see them fly free at all.