Arizona Gets a Clutch of Condors : After 72-year hiatus, the scavengers are being returned to Grand Canyon area.

More than 11,000 years ago, the land above the red rock canyons of northern Arizona was damp and cool. Grazing herds lived atop the verdant plain, galloping in panic from the saber-toothed tigers. And above this American Serengeti, the condor drifted silently, awaiting the remains left by sated carnivores.

There were mammoths and horses, camels and llamas, two kinds of ground sloths, shrub oxen and bison. In pursuit, there were dire wolves, short-faced bears and the saber-toothed cats.

The mammoths are gone; so, too, the camels and tigers and bears.

But the condors are returning.

There goes the road kill.

In a neighborhood where their kind was last sighted 72 years ago, six young condors raised in captivity are about to be set free as part of a program to bring the largest bird in the world--as measured by its 9-foot wingspan--back from imminent extinction.

The birds, hatched six and seven months ago, are now in coops situated in a larger pen atop a mesa along the Vermilion Cliffs, roughly 30 miles southwest of Page, Ariz.

To improve their chances of survival in the wild, they have been kept from any direct contact with humans. The less familiar they are with people, the reasoning goes, the less likely they are to try to fraternize with them.

When food was left for the birds, it was at night, when they had retreated to coops closed by keepers keeping out of sight. When they were moved from the Los Angeles Zoo and a facility in Idaho, the two sites where they were hatched, they were kept in covered kennels to avoid catching even a glimpse of human handlers.

Unless weather conditions are horrendous, sometime tonight the netting on the pens will be removed. At about 10 a.m. Thursday, workers of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, upon a signal from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stationed nearby, will open the coops. The birds will be free.

Will they meander to the cliff’s edge, catch the next thermal and experience for the first time their ability to soar? Or will they be satisfied to peck at nearby chunks of dead flesh left by the hidden hand of the occult keepers? It’s anyone’s guess.

But their first steps are not what matter most. More important to the species’ survival is how this colony, being planted in rugged territory just beyond the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, adapts to what once was its natural habitat.

By now, the release of condors has become old news. There have been enough such successful efforts in remote sections of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties to take away much of the drama. Still, the Arizona program holds the prospect of establishing a second colony. It has ornithologists waiting to crow.

“We’re hedging our bets,” said Lloyd Kiff, science director of the Peregrine Fund, a national group based in Boise, Idaho, that worked in partnership with the Fish and Wildlife Service to raise the birds.

With one population established in Southern California, where 17 birds are living in the wild, another across the Mojave Desert in Arizona and a third in the protective custody of the Los Angeles Zoo, scientists figure that if disease or some other disaster decimates one colony, two others will remain.

The fear of disappointments is not farfetched. Of the Southern California birds, one died from a taste of antifreeze and another was electrocuted when it came in contact with a utility line.

Those were the low points of the decade-long effort to restore a condor population that had dwindled so sharply, down to 20 birds a decade ago, that biologists had tracked each one, brought them in from the wild and began breeding them in captivity. The program’s success exceeded anyone’s expectations: The total population stands now at 121 birds.

But the bird’s proper name is the California condor. Why, you ask, is the species being transplanted to Arizona? After all, the birds had been prevalent during the Pleistocene Epoch over much of what is now the United States, but most had retreated to the Pacific Coast as the first European settlers arrived in the Southwest. Some were found living in Arizona during the end of the 19th century, but none more recently than 1924.

“California, for condors, is a hard gig,” Kiff said. “It is a tough place for them to make it.” In northern Arizona, “there are fewer people and there’s a lot more space.”

Besides, said biologist Michael Wallace of the Los Angeles Zoo, “the site is wonderful in terms of teaching the birds how to forage; it’s one huge cliff, a 45-mile horseshoe.”

Which brings us to road kill.

The birds have been raised on such fitting food, for condors, as the flesh of stillborn calves--the veal-est of the veal, if you will. As a breed, it developed a beak with sufficient power and fortitude to tear away at the hardened meat it found baking on the ground.

And that is what Babbitt expects it to do along Arizona’s byways.

“It is a peaceful, indeed pacifist bird. It’s a scavenger,” the Interior secretary said. “If it’s alive, this bird doesn’t want it.”

“Think of this,” Babbitt said, “as a grand effort to tidy up the American landscape.”