Condor Deaths Bring Stepped-Up Relocation Plan

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 of Ventura County.

Field biologists also may 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.

Last week a year-old female condor died after either colliding with a power line or being hit by a car near California 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 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 deaths by relocating the five remaining birds to more remote areas of the Los Padres National Forest. 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.”

Several large black and white kites resembling condors will be flown above ridge tops in northern areas of the Sespe in an effort to beckon the 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.”

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

But relocation does not guarantee the condors’ safety, he said. Condors can easily travel 100 miles in a day, so 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 there, Weitzel said.

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

In past 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.

Edison and other energy companies have spent about $400,000 to bury 1.6 miles of power lines in oil fields next 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 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has spent about $1 million on the program, which includes monitoring the birds and keeping them in the sanctuary.

Environmentalists expressed concern about the condor deaths but were supportive of the program.

“It’s serious any time you lose an individual member of an endangered species as low in number as the California condors are,” said Alan Sanders, head of the Sespe branch of the Sierra Club. “But I know (the Fish and Wildlife Service) has survival of the condor as their real goal.”

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