Program to Rescue Condor From Extinction Soars : Environment: The effort to return the giant vultures to the wild is right on schedule, curator at L.A. Zoo says. Within five years, there are expected to be 30 to 40 flying free.

Seven young condors ride the wind high above the rugged crags of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in Los Padres National Forest northwest of Los Angeles.

With their huge black wings spanning more than nine feet, the feathers curving upward at the tip, they soar thousands of feet high on thermal currents.

“This species could easily be extinct now--but it’s on an upward curve,” says Lloyd Kiff, who stepped down this year as head of the California Condor Recovery Program, an advisory group working with state and federal agencies to return condors to the wild.

“I think this couldn’t have gone too much better,” Kiff said in an interview at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, which he directs.

“This is about the ugliest bird you can find. But it’s big, it’s rare, it’s just the kind of species that attracts a following.”

Indeed it has. When the California condor was facing extinction in 1987, it became a symbol of the environmental destruction humans were wreaking on the planet.

After a controversial decision in 1987 to capture the 27 birds remaining in the wild, a captive breeding program was started at two Southern California zoos.

The plan was to breed the condors in captivity to preserve the species, then release some of them back into the wild, primarily in the coastal mountains east of Santa Barbara.

“I think we’re right on schedule,” says Mike Wallace, curator of conservation and science at the Los Angeles Zoo, one of two zoos where the birds are being bred.

“Soon we should have 10 to 15 birds each year for release. Within five years, there should be 30 to 40 in the wild.”

The first two birds were released in January, 1992. Six more followed early this year.

One, Chocuyens, died from drinking antifreeze. The other seven, also named from the local Chumash Indian language, are soaring over the Sespe sanctuary, closely but unobtrusively watched by biologists.

Each of the condors is equipped with a wing tag for visual identification and a tiny electronic transmitter to allow for tracking.

Information collected helps the condor recovery team anticipate problems, study behavior and plan for the future.

Two or three days a month, team member Jan Hamber leaves her desk at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, where she is archiving data compiled by the Condor Recovery Program, and treks into the nearby mountains.

Clad in hiking clothes and carrying a shortwave radio, condor tracking equipment, a notebook, binoculars and lunch, she makes her way high into the condor sanctuary.

There, the 63-year-old Cornell University graduate climbs a steep, rocky path to Koford’s Observation Point, where Carl Koford first began studying the dwindling number of California condors in the 1930s.

She settles in for a day of watching and recording the behavior of the seven young birds bred in captivity and now flying free.

“People say, ‘How can you love condors?’ Look!” Hamber says as a condor soars directly overhead, its massive shadow sweeping over the dusty yellow rocks that stud this mountain refuge.

“Condors were meant to soar,” Hamber says as she squints into the sky, smiling as two other condors join the first one. The radio crackles and one of Hamber’s two fellow observers tells her, “They’re headed your way.”

She will spend the day on this sandy ledge nearly 5,000 feet above sea level, recording everything the condors do.

As it turns out, there will be a lot to write about on this trip. Four condors discover the group clustered on the observation point. It’s a fairly large gathering--about a dozen government environmental workers and one visitor--and Hamber says the condors are apt to get curious about so many people.

The giant birds soar overhead for a while, circling the point, and then begin to drop, coming lower and lower with each sweep.

Finally, they are so low and so close that the wind can be heard rushing under their immense wings.

The group disperses and huddles under bushes, hoping the condors will lose interest in them and fly on down the ridge.

They don’t. Soon the birds are almost dive-bombing the assembly, and Hamber shepherds everyone down to a cramped Park Service trailer below the point, messaging her fellow observers that the birds are too close for comfort.

It’s not that the biologists are necessarily afraid of the huge vultures. Rather, they are concerned that getting too cozy with people can be hazardous to the birds’ health.

“They can’t be with people because people shoot them,” says Kiff.

The group goes inside the trailer, but the condors don’t give up. They continue to circle and then finally perch on nearby rocks, impervious to the efforts of two rangers who try to drive them away.

Wings folded, they loom over the clearing where the trailer is parked. In this pose, they look like most other vultures: ominously plump, with forbidding, watchful silhouettes.

But unlike most other vultures, they are extremely scarce. There are only 67 California condors in existence--seven in the wild and 60 in zoos.

“We’re trying to get to the ideal situation--a population in the wild,” Wallace says.

That is at least four years away, because condors are not capable of mating until they are 5 or 6, and the birds out in the wild are all about 2 years old.

The breeding program is likely to expand sometime this year, with new programs starting up at facilities in Idaho and Oklahoma, Wallace says.

And sometime in the future, the recovery team would like to see condors cross the state line. One strong candidate for a condor site is the Grand Canyon.

“We think that if we supply them with food, they’ve got everything else in northern Arizona,” Kiff says. “We know the cliffs are good to nest in because they’re full of condor bones.”

Wallace says the seven young condors now soaring in the wild are adapting well to their mountain habitat, but more work needs to be done to insure they develop a healthy aversion to people.

To help keep the condors alive in the wild, the birds will be given what Wallace calls a “non-lethal negative experience” with people in which rangers use a net gun to trap one or two, then release them.

Condors are naturally curious, and the seven in the wild are already beginning to expand their flight patterns beyond Hopper Ridge and the original release site.

By moving the condors’ food, biologists hope to shift the birds’ flight paths away from populated areas.

Recovery team biologists are optimistic about the future of the California condor. Hamber sums it up with characteristic directness.

“A species doesn’t decide to go extinct,” she says. “There are so few things you can do, and really have an impact. This is a way of mending the world.”