Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Flight of the Condors Causes Flap : Wildlife: The two youthful birds had some concerned and others annoyed when they flew to Castaic Lake.

A pair of Ventura County residents created a minor flap by taking a 40-mile joy ride to Castaic Lake this weekend.

The wayward explorers are California condors from the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in the Los Padres National Forest. They wandered off from the sanctuary and headed for a day at the lake. Their appearance there caused reactions ranging from curiosity to annoyance.

A lifeguard called the condor cops and one bird was cuffed, so to speak, and then transported home in a cage. The other bird eluded efforts to capture it and returned home on its own.

According to sanctuary keepers, it’s hard to blame the birds for the trip--they are just children and it was a warm, sunny day.

But sanctuary officials worry about the trouble that their charges can get into in the outside world.

“California condors are very curious by nature and that curiosity focuses on humans often,” said Jeanne Tinsman, general biologist for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

For the past several weeks a combination of the condors’ young ages, sunny weather and warm air making updrafts readily available has been luring the birds outside the refuge and, quite often, to Castaic Lake.

“All of them have been doing it regularly and I guess two of them were out there Saturday,” Tinsman said, comparing the visits to teen-agers joy riding.

Four of the five birds housed at the Sespe Condor Sanctuary are slightly more than a year old and were first released into the wild in December after being raised at breeding facilities in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Soaring over the lake area with their black wings covering a span of 9 feet each, the birds surprised visitors and settled on the middle section of the Castaic Dam Saturday. After a county lifeguard was unable to shoo them away from the area, he and two Fish and Wildlife workers attempted to capture them.

The female condor was caged and transported back to the sanctuary Saturday. Its accomplice, a young male, returned to refuge on his own. Fish and Wildlife officials hope the birds’ experience was adequately negative so that they will be less likely to wander off again.

The endangered birds present no threat to people but can themselves be harmed by such expeditions, Tinsman said.

There is concern that the condors are not sufficiently wary of humans. There is the fear that people may feed them things that could be deadly. Two condors that wandered out of the sanctuary for three days in June were electrocuted when they perched on high power lines and a third was killed after it left the refuge and drank antifreeze.

Only about 70 condors now live in captivity in Southern California.