Kite Decoys to Be Used for Condor Relocation : Wildlife: Officials want to move vultures to more remote areas. Three of the birds have perished recently.

Speeding up plans to move endangered California condors out of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary after three recent deaths, wildlife officials in the next few days will try using kite decoys to lure the vultures away from populated areas.

Field biologists may also try enticing the condors with calf carcasses and trapping them with nets to move them farther north in the Sespe or northwest to the San Rafael Wilderness in Santa Barbara County, said Marc Weitzel, director of the California Condor Recovery Program.

Although three of the eight condors released in the Ventura County sanctuary near Fillmore 18 months ago have perished, both wildlife officials and environmentalists said Wednesday that the recovery program is working as well as can be expected.

“We knew some of the birds would die,” Weitzel said. “We are not releasing the birds into an ideal habitat.”

Tom Maxwell, a member of the Conejo Valley chapter of the Audubon Society, said that in spite of the deaths he has been happy with the condor program.

“Fish and Wildlife didn’t know the problems they’d be facing when they started this program,” Maxwell said. “These are the risks you take.”

Last week a year-old female condor died after either colliding with a power line or being hit by a car near Highway 126 east of Fillmore. In late May another year-old female condor was electrocuted by a power line in the same area. A third condor was killed near Pyramid Lake in October after ingesting anti-freeze that had been dumped on the ground.

In March two Long Beach men were indicted for attempting to shoot a condor. One man pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing. The other fled the country.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials said they hope to avoid additional fatalities by relocating the remaining birds out of the 46-year-old sanctuary to areas of the Los Padres National Forest in both Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that are farther from populated areas. The 53,000-acre Condor Sanctuary is about five miles from Fillmore, the closest city.

“Nobody has reintroduced California condors before, so there are bound to be trouble spots.” Weitzel said. “We did not know the birds would be attracted to the cities and now, basically, we’ve got to get these birds out of there right away.”

In the first phase of the relocation plan, several large black and white kites resembling condors will be flown 100 feet above ridge tops in northern areas of the Sespe in an effort to beckon the unwitting birds, Weitzel said.

“There’s nothing necessarily magical about flying these kites,” Weitzel said. “Its just something we’re going to try. If it doesn’t work we’ll go to step two.”

The second step involves setting out calf carcasses and netting or grabbing the carrion-eating birds when they come to feed. The birds would then be hauled in cages to the San Rafael Wilderness, Weitzel said.

But relocation does not guarantee the condors’ safety, Weitzel said.

Condors can easily travel 100 miles in a day, so if the birds are merely lured to other parts of the Sespe Wilderness area they could quickly return to their former roosting areas, Weitzel said.

That scenario is less likely if the condors are trapped and released in the more remote San Rafael Wilderness area. But wildlife officials will have a more difficult time traversing the rugged terrain to monitor the birds, Weitzel said.

Meanwhile, officials at Southern California Edison said Wednesday that they have agreed to install additional anti-perching devices on about a dozen power lines near the Sespe Condor Sanctuary.

In the past two years the company has installed several of the spiked, inverted v-shaped devices to discourage condors from sitting on the lines, Edison senior biologist Dan Pierson said. Each anti-perching device costs about $200, Pierson said.

Edison and other energy companies have already spent about $400,000 to bury 1.6 miles of power lines in oil fields adjacent to the condor sanctuary. But hundreds of miles of power lines remain within the condor flight area.

“It would be prohibitively expensive to eliminate all potential collision hazards for condors,” Pierson said.

Since beginning the effort to reintroduce the condors into the wild two years ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service has spent about $1 million on the program, which includes monitoring the birds and keeping them in the sanctuary.

There are 76 condors in existence. All but the five in the Sespe are in captivity--half at the Wild Animal Park in San Diego County and half at the Los Angeles Zoo.

The condors in the Sespe were released 18 months ago as part of a $15-million program to reintroduce the nearly extinct birds into the wild.

The Fish and Wildlife Service plans to release six more of the captive condors into the San Rafael Wilderness in Santa Barbara County in December.