Environment : Condors in the Mist Make Scientists’ Hearts Soar : In Colombia, the Earth’s biggest flying creatures are being saved from extinction. California ecologists are watching the experiment with interest.

They floated majestically above the slate-gray reservoir, spiraling upward on currents of warm air. With no visible movement of their vast outstretched wings, five young Andean condors rose into a white band of clouds high in the faded green mountains.

Juan Manuel Paez spotted them from across the reservoir, slammed his red Chevrolet pickup to a halt and grabbed the binoculars off the dashboard, focusing quickly to relish the sight.

When the huge birds were brought here from California, the biologist explained, they avoided clouds. It took eight months, he said, but once they felt secure, they plunged in and flew blind.

“It was a rite of passage,” Paez said. “Look at them now. They are fascinated by clouds.”

The spectacle of condors in the mist is one measure of the success of Colombia’s new program to save these endangered scavengers, the largest flying creatures on Earth. It is a sign that the birds, hatched in the zoos of Los Angeles and San Diego, are adapting to the rarefied Andean heights once ruled by their ancestors.

Revered by indigenous peoples and enshrined as national symbols, wild Andean condors are diminishing in number in all seven South American countries where they once flourished. Colombia is leading an effort to reverse the trend by releasing zoo-born yearlings into the wild.

Twenty-two young condors have been set loose since mid-1989--nine in this park in the mountains near Bogota, eight in Purace National Park in the Cauca Valley and five on the Los Chiles Indian reservation near the Ecuadorean border. Seven more are to be freed this year.

Inderesa, Colombia’s environmental agency, is committed to feeding and monitoring the condors until they can forage for food on their own, mate and make the colonies self-sustaining.

“We’re talking about more than saving a bird,” said Paez, the program’s 26-year-old coordinator. “We’re talking about saving our cultural heritage. We want to be able to show our children a living symbol of our nation, not just a photograph of something extinct, like a dinosaur.”

So far, all three colonies are surviving. Those in Los Chiles have blended into a population of 14 wild condors. The others, launched into “condor vacuums” where previous colonies had been wiped out, are slowly extending their flight range but still depend on meals served by humans. Three of the new condors have died. The oldest survivors are still three years too young to mate.

Yet, the experiment is sound enough to serve as a model. Venezuela, where the condor is extinct, plans to release four Andean condors, to be sent from San Diego later this year. California scientists, who last month released zoo-bred California condors for the first time into Los Padres National Park, are studying Colombia’s program for ways to perfect their own.

“What’s going on in Colombia is very much experimental but very important,” said Mike Wallace, curator of birds at the Los Angeles Zoo, who helped launch the condors here. “If it can be shown that these birds can be put back in the environment there and protected from being shot or poisoned, then there’s hope for condors elsewhere.”

The Andean condor, slightly larger than its California cousin, can weigh up to 33 pounds, spread its wings 10 1/2 feet and live 60 years. Charles Darwin, observing the Andean condor soar effortlessly over Chile in the 19th Century, called it “the bird of perfect flight.”

But both species are vulnerable creatures--cornered by encroaching human settlement, pollution, deforestation and uncontrolled hunting. They are also slow to reproduce.

Wallace estimates that 5,000 to 10,000 Andean condors still live in South America, mostly in Chile and Argentina. But by the late 1980s, only 23 were left in the wilds of Colombia. The population of California condors, whose ancestors roamed North America, had dwindled to only 27 when all were captured in an effort to save the species.

It was then that the fates of condors in California and Colombia became intertwined. Andean condors had been displayed in zoos in the United States since 1956. In 1988, female descendants of that group were first released in Los Padres for “guinea pig” observation by scientists preparing to reintroduce the California condors there.

To avoid reproducing Andean condors in the wilds of California, Andean males were kept caged. Something had to be done with their growing numbers, so they were flown here to become pioneers in Colombia’s own save-the-condor project.

As the five condors vanished into the clouds across the reservoir, Paez pointed the antenna of a hand-held radio in their direction and scanned all frequencies. He picked up irregular beeps on five of them. “ Los machos ,” he said.

Clipped to a wing of each condor is a tiny transmitter that beams radio signals on its own unique frequency. Paez’s radio identified the group in flight as Chingaza’s males, the first sent from California in 1989. The signals enable Paez to monitor every move of “my children.”

Arriving in this park two miles above sea level, the pioneer males spent two weeks under a huge net on their man-made feeding platform. When the net was removed, they dropped clumsily to the ground, couldn’t fly back up and had to be recaptured. The experience taught scientists that year-old condors brought from sea level need one to three months to adjust to the Andes.

Once airborne, the condors behaved more predictably. They fell in behind Bolivar, the oldest and biggest, who still decides when and where they eat, sleep, take off and land. So far, Bolivar rarely takes the colony out to eat on its own. Instead, he leads them to the horse meat or cow fetuses left on the platform by Paez’s staff.

The colony’s slowly expanding range within the 124,000-acre park, a treeless but humid Andean plain, has yet to exceed 10 miles from their release site in the Golillas Canyon. Scientists note that young Andean condors fly 10 times that far in much drier Southern California. Even so, the dampness has proven less a burden than scientists expected.

Soon after the five males took off, the park’s four females, who arrived last year and still sleep separately, stirred from their dormitory and joined the males in flight. The colony spent 85 minutes aloft in a humid sky--spiraling in and out of clouds, zooming forward in single file, swooping over the food platform (but not landing) and splitting off into smaller groups to explore the canyon.

One playful male tried to land in flight on the wings of another, prompting him to dip suddenly. Six condors buzzed a mist-shrouded observation post to check out a reporter and photographer. They glided 10 feet overhead with a roar of wind that seemed to magnify their immense black forms.

“What this shows,” said Wallace, interviewed by phone from the Los Angeles Zoo, “is that if we are thinking of releasing California condors in, say, Washington State, and we’re looking at a nice habitat with the right cliffs, the right demography of people, the right food available--our experience in Colombia tells me that we should be less worried about all the clouds and rain in (Washington’s) environment.”

But the Andean condor still has much to prove about its long-term ability to survive in Colombia.

California scientists say the deaths of three zoo-bred condors in Colombia have not been fully explained. Two died of intestinal infection and one of a leg infection, Paez said. But the latter didn’t get a proper autopsy, apparently because Colombia’s annual $17,000 condor budget--30 times smaller than California’s--is inadequate for quick attention to problems in the field.

Some Colombian ecologists fault the program for imitating California’s emphasis on feeding the condors “like chickens” and making them dependent on humans. Paez rejects such criticism.

“For 500 years, we have degraded the condor’s environment,” he said. “How about if we make it up by feeding them another 500 years?”

So far, the newcomers have registered only two cases of eating on their own. Wallace believes the offspring of Bolivar’s colony might venture beyond Chingaza--which is almost devoid of deer and other large animals that once sustained wild condors--and forage for animal carcasses in the surrounding farm communities.

That would be a crucial test of the program’s modest efforts to educate the local peasants. Their grandparents in the 1920s killed off the last condors in this province, whose name, Cundinamarca, means “heights where the condor flies.”

Children of eight nearby communities are now brought to the park on school trips to see the condors and hear lectures. In Los Chiles, indigenous people who still worship the condor help Paez’s staff record the birds’ movements and gather old horses for their food.

If the condor survives, Paez said, environmentalists want to get the government and local farmers behind similar efforts to save other endangered animals--the white-tailed deer, the Andean bear, the silver fox, the Paramo eagle, the Paramo tapir.

“The educational value of this program is immense,” said Wallace. “It’s a very important step toward the salvation of the species, but it’s just one phase. I think we’ll feel more successful when we see adult birds out there breeding on their own.”

Wild Andean Condor

Type: Scavenger

Weight: Up to 33 pounds

Wing span: 10 1/2 feet

Life span: 60 years

Range: Formerly, seven South American countries.

Population: 5,000 to 10,000

Status: Endangered by human settlement, pollution, deforestation and uncontrolled hunting.