Bred to soar: despite setbacks, captive-hatched California condors are now surviving at a higher rate when released into the wild.

• Author: Cohn, Jeffrey P.
• Position: Cover Story

It was three o'clock one cold November morning two years ago, and Mike Wallace was trudging up a steep canyon in the Sierra de San Pedro Martir in the northern part of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula. Tired and hungry, Wallace carried a California condor known simply as Number 59 under his arm. To catch that condor in the dark of night, he had to hike several miles down the canyon through dense chaparral, climb sixty feet up a tall Jeffrey's pine to where the bird was roosting, set up a strobe light to distract the condor, and then grab and lower it to two of his Mexican crew on the ground while dangling upside down from a tree limb.

Number 59 was one of three captive-hatched California condors released to the wild a few days earlier in the Sierra de San Pedro Martir. Before the birds could adjust to their new freedom and unfamiliar territory, however, two were attacked in the air by golden eagles, a not uncommon danger for condors. Number 59 retreated to the safety of trees in the heavily forested mountainside. The few times the frightened bird ventured out he napped low through the trees, a very uncondor-like behavior. Today, after the dramatic rescue and successful second release on Baja six months later, Number 59 symbolizes both the achievements and problems of reintroducing endangered California condors to the wild. It also symbolizes the personal commitment of researchers like Wallace to the survival of condors. "I've been working with condors since 1980," says Wallace, a wildlife specialist at the San Diego Zoo and leader of the California condor recovery team since 1992. "I never thought I would be doing condors for so long. I have a lot invested in this species."

Once on the brink of extinction, there are now more California condors both in the wild and in captivity in at least a hall" century. Indeed, captive condors are now so numerous they are housed in four separate breeding facilities in the United States. Some of their offspring fly free at roar release sites in two U.S. states and one in Mexico. Reintroduced condors have even begum to breed and find food on their own in the wild.

Despite these successes, the effort to save California condors continues to have problems, evoke criticisms, and generate controversy. Captive-hatched condors released to the wild have died at what to stone people are alarmingly high rates. Others have had to be recaptured after they acted foolishly or became ill. As a result, the scientists, zookeepers, and conservationist who are concerned about condors have bickered among themselves over the best ways to rear and release the birds.

At first glance, why anyone would want to save California condors is not entirely clear. Unlike the closely related Andean condors with their white neck fluff or king vultures with brilliant black-and-white coloring, California condors are not much to see. Their dull black color--even when contrasted with white underwings-featherless head and neck, oversized feet, and blunt talons are hardly signs of beauty or strength. Nor have the condors' carrion-eating habits endeared them to many people.

Their appeal begins to become evident when they take flight. With nine-and-a-half-foot wingspans and weights up to twenty-eight pounds, California condors are North America's largest fully flighted birds. In the Americas, only Andean condors are bigger. California condors can soar almost effortlessly for hours, often covering hundreds of miles a day. Only occasionally do they need to flap their wings to take off, change direction, or find a band of warm air known as a thermal to carry them higher.

In prehistoric times, California condors ranged from southern British Columbia in Canada to northern Baja and east across the southern United States to Florida and New York. By the time Europeans arrived, condors were limited to the mountains along the Pacific coast. Perhaps a hundred or more remained by the 1940s, all confined to a U-shaped region in the mountains and foothills north of Los Angeles. By the early 1980s, they numbered only twenty-one.

No one knows for sure why California condors almost disappeared. Probably never numerous anywhere, condors may have begun declining when large Ice Age mammals like mammoths and giant ground sloths, on whose carcasses they...