ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 13, 1996 TAG: 9612130070
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: VERMILION CLIFFS, ARIZ.
SOURCE: Associated Press
DRAWINGS OF THE BIRDS made by ancient Anasazi Indians show the California condor once soared the skies over Arizona. After Thursday's release, they do again.
For the first time in 72 years, the largest and rarest bird in North America took flight over Arizona's red cliffs and canyons Thursday in an effort by scientists to bring California condors back from the brink.
For thousands of years, condors flew over these craggy sandstone cliffs and fed on carcasses of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Then hunters and other hazards of humankind pushed them to near extinction.
Twenty condors now survive in the wild in California since a captive breeding program began in the 1980s, and the government wants to establish a second wild population in northern Arizona.
Following a countdown led by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on Thursday, a biologist atop the 1,000-foot cliffs opened a pen on a rocky ledge where six young condors have lived since Oct. 29.
The baldheaded fledglings walked out a few minutes apart and surveyed their surroundings to the cheers of 500 birdwatchers below. Ten minutes later, one condor turned into the wind and lifted its 9-foot wings, flapping awkwardly to a ledge 50 yards away. The crowd let out a whoop.
The rest, all 6- to 7-months old and weighing about 20 pounds, soon followed with short aerial spurts among the rocks and junipers. None immediately ventured off the cliffs that their ancestors inhabited since the Ice Age.
``I'm standing here trying not to cry,'' said Robert Mesta, condor program coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ``We couldn't have sculpted it any better - birds flying, sun shining, blue sky.''
Biologists, schoolchildren and others peered through binoculars from an open plain below.
``They're just learning to use their wings and how to fly at this point, so they'll probably stay pretty close to the cliffs the first few weeks as they take their initial flights,'' Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Jeff Humphrey said.
Minutes before they were freed, Navajo medicine man Jones Benally said a prayer.
``They are back where they belong,'' he said, referring to the canyons beneath the cliffs, where drawings of the birds made by ancient Anasazi Indians can be found. Scientists say condor bones found in a nearby cave are 11,000 years old.
``They were here a long time - we have come full circle,'' Benally said.
The birds are equipped with radio transmitters and wing tags so scientists can track them. They're the first captive condors released outside California, and the first to have been raised by their parents, rather than by human beings using ``condor puppets.'' They have come into contact with human beings only twice, and biologists hope they'll be naturally people-shy in the wild.
Five were hatched and reared last summer at the Los Angeles Zoo, and the sixth came from the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho.
People shot, poached and poisoned California condors until only nine birds remained by 1985, with none left in the wild by 1987.
A decade of captive breeding has brought the number of condors up to about 120. The first condors were released in the coastal mountains of central California in 1992, with several releases since then.
The birds, whose adult wingspans can reach 12 feet, may have more luck in Arizona than California, where some of the previously released condors have died after coming into contact with power lines, antifreeze and other man-made hazards.
Here, they can ride the warm air above hundreds of thousands of acres of sparsely populated federal park preserves.
LENGTH: Medium: 73 linesby CNB