‘Protective Custody’ Proposed for State’s Vanishing Condors

Faced with an apparent plunge in the population of wild California condors, federal wildlife officials will consider a proposal this week to capture all the remaining condors from their home in the coastal mountains and place them in Southern California zoos.

The plan has emerged as part of a radical and controversial strategy to deal with what some officials see as an emerging crisis in the wild condor population. In the last two months, four of the remaining 15 wild condors have disappeared from the mountains north of Ventura, and the number of breeding pairs has dropped from five last year to one.

Under the plan, which will be submitted to the federal Condor Recovery Team on Thursday, the captured condors would take part in an established breeding program at the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos. The breeding program is designed to build a new population of condors that eventually will be reintroduced to the wild.

“We’re talking about a kind of protective custody for the few (condors) that are left,” said Arthur Risser, general curator of the San Diego Zoo. “It will allow us to preserve a condor culture until we are ready to release young birds from the captive population.”

At the Condor Research Center in Ventura, a joint project of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Audubon Society, officials emphasized that no decision has yet been made to move ahead with the plan. If adopted, however, it will represent a dramatic shift in the effort to preserve the species of huge vultures in their natural home.

Until this week, the preservation strategy called for the selective capture of birds and eggs for use in the breeding program while still maintaining a natural population in the wild. At present 16 birds are being raised at the two zoos and, until January, an equal number existed in the wild.

Noel Snyder, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist at the Condor Research Center, said a major purpose of the wild population is to serve as models for the captive birds when they are introduced to the wilderness. But the recent declines have raised fears that the wild population will disappear before the zoos can raise the young birds to adulthood.

“If we leave the wild population out there to dwindle away, they won’t be there to function as guide birds when we really need them,” Snyder said. Under the new plan, the veteran birds would be re-released to the wild to serve as models when the captive flock is ready in three to five years.

Snyder noted that no conclusions have been reached about the recent disappearances and said that it is still “conceivable” that some of the birds could turn up alive. But about 750 man-days already have been spent searching on the ground and in the air, with no positive results. “Every day it looks worse and worse,” he said.

To try to determine the cause of the sudden population drop, the Recovery Team also will consider a plan to replace the California condors in the wild with a similar species known as Andean condors. These condors also are endangered in their native South America but are readily available from U.S. zoos, officials said. If the plan is approved, the Andean condors would be fitted with radio transmitters to allow scientists to follow their movements.

The proposal for capture of the remaining birds will be made to the Recovery Team by an informal committee known as the “working group.” The group is composed of the leadership from local zoos, the Condor Research Center and several government agencies involved in the condor effort.

Opposition Probable

Still, the proposal faces almost certain opposition from several environmental groups and some dissenting scientists. David Phillips, a specialist on endangered species who works with Friends of the Earth, said efforts to preserve the condor’s habitat would suffer if there are no California condors left in the wild.

“What will this mean to developers who want to put in subdivisions, to dam builders, oil drillers and the off-road vehicle people?” Phillips asked. “All these people could rightly say, why should we be restricted when the condors have been sent off to zoos?”

Sanford Sprunt, director of research for the National Audubon Society, said that group has no official position on the plan but said that sentiment is shifting against it. “We think the jury is still out on the fate of the missing condors,” Sprunt said. “So why take this precipitate action until you really know what’s going on out there?”

As for the plan to replace California condors with the Andean variety, Sprunt noted that there are federal laws prohibiting the introduction of non-native species in the United States.

Lengthy Debate Predicted

Both sides agreed that a lengthy debate will ensue over the new proposal. Before being adopted, it must win approval from both the Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Fish and Game Commission.

Michael Scott, director of the Condor Research Center, described the capture plan as an “extreme option” and noted that the center was still in the process of determining what has gone wrong this season with the condors.

“We’re making an expanded effort to census the birds and get some firm estimates on just how many we have left,” he said. “We want to know as much as possible before we jump one way or the other.”