Biologists Hope to Save Condors With ‘Tough Love’ : Preservation: After a failed effort, a controversial boot camp at L.A. Zoo teaches birds how to avoid civilization.

A $20-million taxpayer investment paid off big time a few days ago when a hissing California condor craned its scabby neck, snapped its curving beak and ripped a sizable chunk of skin from biologist Robert Mesta’s thumb.

The young condor was, most definitely, biting the hand that fed it. But Mesta could not have been more delighted.

For his attacker, a gawky creature with crusty white legs and ruffled black feathers, will be released into the remote roughness of Santa Barbara County with five fellow condors on Wednesday. And Mesta takes his sore thumb as an omen that this batch of birds will survive--unlike previous zoo-bred condors, which grew so fond of their human handlers that they could not adjust to freedom.

Five of the 13 fledglings let loose with great hoopla in 1992 and 1993 perished in the wild. Three smashed into utility poles. Another lapped up antifreeze. One was electrocuted. And another barely evaded a hunter’s bullets.

Horrified by the deaths, Mesta and his federal condor recovery team snatched most of the surviving birds back to captivity. The problem, they concluded, was that the endangered vultures were too friendly, too inquisitive, too naive. Bored with backcountry sanctuaries, the condors repeatedly popped in on suburbia--and never realized the perils prickling all around them.

So the federal team scrapped the release program--years and millions in the making--and came up with a fresh but controversial strategy: Bird boot camp at the L.A. Zoo.

The six condors to be set free Wednesday have all endured weeks of grueling discipline, of punishment every time they strayed near power poles or cozied up to humans.

Purists protest that manipulating condor behavior destroys valuable instincts--instincts that have guided the species for 11 million years. Yet Mesta believes the “tough love” strategy could save the mythic red-eyed vulture with the vast wingspan and the graceful glide. His gashed thumb proves, he says, that zoo-reared birds can be taught to steer clear of man, and man-made menaces.

But will the fledglings retain that lesson in the months ahead? Or will their innate curiosity lead them straight to power poles and poachers? No one knows for sure.

“There’s no code book telling how to go about saving a species,” said biologist Chris Barr, who joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s condor team three years ago. “It’s all a big experiment.”

Backed by a $500,000 annual budget, federal biologists launched the latest phase of the condor experiment by erecting fake power poles alongside natural perches in a holding pen at the L.A. Zoo. Condors who land on the poles receive a mild electric shock designed to startle and discomfort them.

After a few jolts, they get the message.

To reinforce the lesson, scientists have also set up four shock-generating poles at the release site near Lion Canyon in Santa Barbara County.

“Who would have thought it would come to this?” mused Michael Wallace, the zoo’s curator of conservation and science. “Here we were training them and coddling them, (and) now we’re trying to scare the guano out of them.”

Such traps unsettle the biologists nearly as much as the condors.

After years on the job, most condor watchers admit to finding the legendary birds oddly endearing. Through careful breeding, they have tripled the condor population to 88 birds. And they can tell the vultures apart by their quirky personalities. Xewe, the first zoo-bred condor ever released, ducks her head when humans approach, while Topa Topa, an aggressive male, struts to impress his pen mates. Some biologists can distinguish condor moods by observing how the birds’ heads shift shades, from blue to pink to yellow.

Acting harshly toward these curious vultures “is hard, because it goes against all your training,” Mesta said.

Hard, but vital, he believes. So in another training exercise at the zoo, members of the condor recovery team have deliberately sought to put the fear of man in birds.

“If they walk up and lick your hand, you’re in trouble,” Mesta said. “Whenever they see a human, we want them to think, ‘I’d rather be in some dark cave somewhere.’ We’ve got to get them smart enough so they survive.”

To crush condors’ sociable instincts, two people pop up on a ridge within the vultures’ sight. As soon as the birds notice the human figures, biologists rush forward, capture the terrified condors, hold them upside down and then lock them into dog kennels, releasing them only under cover of night.

The first time the condor recovery team tried this, the birds were stunned. But they soon learned that humans meant trouble. The condors began regurgitating from stress the instant they glimpsed the far-off figures on the hillside. When the biologists appeared in their pens, the birds attacked with gusto.

“That,” Mesta said, “is an excellent sign.”

But a sign of what?

Environmentalists with the Sierra Club and National Audubon Society criticize the shock therapy program as a misguided attempt to manipulate the condors’ age-old instincts.

“Beating up on the birds is not going to make them successful in the wild,” said Jesse Grantham, the Audubon assistant director for sanctuaries.

“They’re inherently curious at that age” and eager to explore both people and strange objects, Grantham said. “Maybe in their evolutionary past, it was important for them to be curious. And now you’re saying (to the condors): ‘You can’t be what you inherently are. So we’re going to smack you around a little and change your behavior.’ ”

In their rush to save the species, biologists may be molding a “designer condor,” said Mark Palmer, a member of the Sierra Club’s national wildlife committee. This tailor-made vulture, he said, might be able to survive in the modern world, but would lack the prehistoric instincts that guided its ancestors millions of years ago, in the era of the woolly mammoth and great ground sloth.

“If we’re creating these designer condors for the wild and pretending we’re back in the good old days with real condors, we’re just fooling ourselves,” Palmer said. “It’s wrong to suggest that condors have to adapt to mankind.”

To biologists, however, a manipulated condor is better than a dead condor.

And they well remember how quickly the untrained fledglings released in 1992 and 1993 picked up potentially fatal habits.

Propelled by powerful instincts, the young condors flocked to ancient roosting spots--and hovered there even though concrete had long since crushed chaparral.

In the most startling case, two males and a female rode last summer’s wind currents to the town of Pine Mountain Club in Kern County, a site once revered by Chumash Indians as condor country. No longer desolate wilderness, the rolling mountains now shelter 2,000 year-round residents and up to 8,000 fair-weather vacationers. All this human activity, however, did not bother the condors a bit.

Wearing bright yellow tags proclaiming “If Found Reward,” condors No. 83, 88 and 92 virtually adopted Pine Mountain Club.

They ripped holes in the tarp covering resident Billy Blagg’s barbecue, intent on foraging the scraps of meat clinging to the grill. They glided over a neighbor’s hot tub, then returned to poke around Blagg’s sewer vent. And they stubbornly refused to flee even when state wildlife experts whacked telephone poles with baseball bats in an attempt to scare them off.

“They’re not afraid of people, not at all,” Blagg said.

In Pine Mountain Club, the birds’ naivete mattered little. The town boasts a restaurant called the Condor Cafe, a hangout dubbed the Condor Room, and a newsletter titled the Condor. So naturally, residents respected the great vultures and treated them well.

But not every neighborhood would welcome a flock of imperious vultures with 10-foot wing- spans, 20-pound bodies and a passion for rotting flesh.

Ungainly and slow to get off the ground, condors make easy targets for hunters. In populated areas, they face other threats as well: snapping dogs, speeding cars and toxic wastes. All these factors killed off the condors in years past. And biologists do not want the young chicks they raised in captivity to suffer similar fates.

“We’re never going to be able to turn the clock back,” Mesta said. “Southern California will not be what it was. So we’re going to have to integrate (condors) into the modern landscape.”

In his crusade to save the condor, Mesta takes heart from the knowledge that other birds of ancient stock, such as golden eagles and turkey vultures, have adjusted to the new world order. Even peregrine falcons, a venerable species once slipping toward extinction, bounced back when the pesticide DDT was banned, and now roost comfortably in glass-and-steel skyscrapers.

“Given some protection and some assistance, (condors) will evolve to live compatibly with (the environment) we present to them,” Mesta said.

But the birds face one overwhelming obstacle.

When the condor population skidded to less than two dozen in the early 1980s, biologists rounded up every last bird for safekeeping. So there are no adult condors left in the wild to teach the zoo-bred chicks proper vulture behavior. Without parental guidance, the fledglings flit recklessly about like a brood of unruly teen-agers.

Now that captive breeding has boosted the condor population to 88, some environmentalists believe that biologists should release a few wild-born adults to serve as role models for the zoo-reared fledglings.

Federal biologists have balked at that idea, insisting they must keep the older condors in captivity to preserve a broad gene pool. In a compromise, they plan to let some of the captive condors raise their own young, instead of snatching away each greenish-white egg as soon as it is laid. They hope that the adults will tip off the babies on the proper--and safe--way to behave in the wild.

“There are a number of cards yet to play in the condor relief effort,” said Pete Bloom, a veteran raptor trapper who worked with the federal team in the 1980s. “In 10 years, they could be a regular part of the California sky.”

Santa Barbara resident Robert O. Easton certainly hopes so. He and his father conducted the first condor census back in 1934, and he has remained enthralled by the bulky birds ever since. He longs to see condor shadows, fringed with slim feathers on each wingtip, spin once again across the landscape.

“They’re a tremendous symbol, you see, just a tremendous symbol,” Easton said. “They’re a symbol of the whole wild world we have to learn to live with.”

Times staff writer Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this report.

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