Caged Animals Trained for Return to the Wild : Wildlife: Colombian center takes in animals seized from smugglers and tries to show them how to fend for themselves. Program is funded by London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals.

Alerted by the flapping of wings, the jungle cat spotted its prey and pounced.

A swipe of a furry, clawed paw across the neck and the bird was dead. The margay, a small tiger-like cat native to Latin America, clamped the game hen in its jaws and padded deeper into its cage.

“He’s learning well,” naturalist Fernando Londono said as the margay deftly ripped away feathers and sank fangs into hot flesh.

The margay is an honor student at a center run by the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals that trains animals to return to the wild.

The animals come from lawmen who raid gangs involved in the illicit trade of live wild animals. It has become a $10-billion-a-year business worldwide--third only to the trafficking of drugs and arms.

Traffickers can buy a macaw for $100 in South America and sell it for up to $6,000 in North America or Europe. Animals are often shipped under appalling conditions. Parrots are jammed into suitcases and crates, their beaks and wings bound.

The animals that wind up in the society’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, set amid Andean grasslands on the outskirts of Bogota, have a chance at living in the wild again.

The margay, called a tigrillo --little tiger--in Spanish, is learning to fend for itself so rapidly that workers plan to release it into the jungle within a few months. The rehabilitation center, one of a handful in the world, has returned hundreds of animals to the wild since it opened three years ago.

But the procedure is risky. Besides the threat of predators or accidents, released animals can endanger their species if they have a disease alien to the local population.

Society officials don’t know the survival rate because released animals are not tracked by radio transmitter.

Naturalist Bill Toone, who helped direct the attempt to return endangered California condors to the wild, is critical of naturalists who try to release numerous species.

“The only thing they’ve done is make themselves feel better, because the animals are dying where they can’t see them,” Toone said in a telephone interview from San Diego.

He said that despite having focused intensively on only one species, the condor program has been “an absolute failure.” Released condors have died crashing into power lines or ingesting antifreeze and other poisons.

Toone believes centers that release many species with less study are toying with nature, with unforeseen consequences.

“When you put animals into the wild, you don’t know what you’ve done,” Toone said. “It’s like AIDS, a web of trouble that can go with it.”

But Jean Patrick Le Duc, spokesman for the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, applauds the Colombian program. The convention, which seeks to halt trade in endangered wild species, has been adopted by 122 nations.

“Police are reluctant to confiscate animals because they don’t know what to do with them,” Le Duc said in a phone interview from Geneva. “But if they have a center like the one in Bogota to turn to, they’re more likely to confiscate animals, and that helps us enforce the convention.”

Animals brought to the society’s rehabilitation center are taken to its clinic for blood and fecal tests and X-rays.

On a recent day, a newly arrived owl was the subject of veterinarian Fernando Nassar’s exam.

The owl, whose brown wings laced with white dots extend to almost three feet, had a hood over its head to calm it. Still, it plunged its talons into a thick leather glove on Nassar’s hand as he probed for broken bones and other injuries.

Workers at the center are honing another owl’s hunting instincts by releasing mice into its cage through a tube from behind a screen of bushes, so the owl doesn’t associate humans with food.

After Nassar released a group of monkeys last November, he saw two fall from trees when a breeze moved branches as they leaped. Now, workers move branches inside cages by pulling strings, getting captive monkeys accustomed to swaying branches.

Lynn Hooey, a Londoner who is one of the half-dozen workers at the center, recently helped release nine squirrel monkeys into Colombia’s eastern plains.

“It was beautiful, seeing them coming out of the cages and slowly realizing there were no bars anymore,” she said.

The center resounds with the screeches of monkeys, parrots and other animals. There are about 500 in all, including eagles and hawks, tamarins, boa constrictors and pacaranas--pig-like animals that are among the biggest rodents in the world.

The star pupil, the margay, will soon graduate to a 100-yard-long cage where contact with humans is further limited. There, it will be fed live guinea pigs in addition to game hens.

The cage’s current resident, an ocelot, has learned quickly. It now hunts the guinea pigs. At first, it ran from them.