Scientists Free 8 Condors in Backcountry of Los Padres : Wildlife: With 13 of the giant vultures now flying high in Southern California, biologists say captive breeding has been a big success.

Eight endangered California condors were released in the remote backcountry of the Los Padres National Forest on Tuesday, bringing to 13 the number of the giant vultures now soaring in Southern California skies.

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As about 35 biologists, former researchers and others crowded behind spy scopes on a narrow mountain road, biologist Chris Barr crept behind the 30-by-60-foot box where the birds had been held for a week and removed the bars, biologists said.

Five minutes later, one of the three-foot-tall, 18-month-old condors hopped out. No. 7 stretched its sleek black wings that spanned about nine feet across, flapped several times and leaped into the sky.

At first, the bird stayed close, making a long, low pass at the box where its companions remained. But within minutes, the bird’s maiden flight had turned into a long, skillful soar, 500 feet above its awed audience, said Robert Mesta, coordinator for the Ventura-based Condor Recovery Program of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

“He broke into the blue sky,” Mesta shouted as No. 7 gained altitude over the white sandstone formations of the Lion Canyon release site in Santa Barbara County. Moments later, another condor was soaring and a third taking short, hopping flights, he said.

“These are great flights,” Mesta said. “We’ve never had flights like these before.”

At that, John Schmitt, a wildlife artist from Norwalk, popped the champagne.

“This validates the whole project,” Schmitt said in a telephone interview from the release site. “The birds are nothing until you have them out there interacting with the habitat.”

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Tuesday’s release, the fifth in the program, marked the beginning of a new and more successful phase for the Condor Recovery Program, a $15-million, 10-year effort to save the condors from extinction, Mesta said.

Three more releases are scheduled this year, including one in December at Lion Canyon, another at nearby Bear Trap, and a third north of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Biologists are also working to arrange a fourth release site at Castle Crags in the Los Padres mountains of eastern San Luis Obispo County.

“We feel that we’ve been simmering all this time,” Mesta said. “Now we’re really cooking. From now on, our results are really going to be measurable.”

The condor recovery program began after the population of the vultures that roamed the skies of North America since the Pleistocene Era had dropped to an all-time low of 22. Biologists captured the last wild condor in 1987 in an effort to bring the population back from the brink of extinction through a captive-breeding program.

There are now 104 California condors, including the 13 in the wild, three more at sort of preschool at Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge north of Fillmore, and the remaining population at breeding facilities at the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos and in Idaho.

Captive breeding is a complete success, biologists said. But there have been disappointments in the field. Of the 32 birds that have been released since 1992, only 13 are free.

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Four condors, three of them released in the Los Padres forest north of Fillmore, died after collisions with power lines and poles, and another died after eating antifreeze. Others were returned to the zoo after they became too curious about civilization, some landing on back-yard fences in Santa Barbara, others perching on a fence near a burger joint in New Cuyama.

Another fell seriously ill after it was lured into a campground by some visitors who wanted to photograph themselves with the bird, biologists said. The visitors fed the animal popcorn and hot dogs, despite entreaties from rangers not to feed the animals.

All 13 of the scavenging birds now in the wild have undergone extensive aversion training to teach them to steer clear of power poles and people.

Biologists say that therapy, which included repeated shocks when they landed on simulated power poles as well as exercises reinforcing a fear of humans, was successful for the most part.

The next step, Mesta said, is food aversion training.

“That could be a problem, though, because vultures eat the most grotesque things,” Mesta said. “It may not be easy to find something that is adverse to them. Maybe a hot dog with jalapeno, or popcorn with chili powder.”

The program is also experimenting with a plan to allow the condor parents to rear their babies up to at least three months, on the theory that adult condors may be able to teach the chicks something that biologists cannot.

In addition, four of the parent-reared chicks will be held at a new facility at the Hopper Mountain refuge, where they are not exposed to heavy equipment, voices or other human sounds at the zoos while they await release.

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Those chicks will be released in December at the Bear Trap site near the Lion Canyon area. They are being released in a separate area to see whether the chicks are better off being reared by their parents and then held in a more natural setting.

The birds released on Tuesday were nearly a year older than most condors when they are set free. They were old enough last February, but were held back to see whether the aversion therapy worked.

Because they are older, they were more steady on the wing than 6-month-old chicks of the earlier releases, Mesta said.

“The longer we can hold them the better off they are,” Mesta said.

Eric Johnson, a biology teacher at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, called the sight of the soaring birds “impressive.”

“They are finding out what those things sticking out of their bodies are for,” he said. “They don’t have to just flap them anymore.”

Now, he said, they can fly.