Captive Breeding

Biologists on Saturday captured one of the three known remaining California condors in the wild and transported it by airplane in good condition to the San Diego Wild Animal Park to join a captive breeding program for the highly endangered species. The bird, designated as AC-2, was snared by a net while feeding on the Hudson Ranch in the foothills of southern Kern County. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced purchase of the 11,500-acre ranch last week as a future condor refuge.

It's a cool morning, and the Arabian oryx herd at the San Diego Zoo's Safari Park is hungry and slightly hostile to the visitors in its midst. The dominant male, known as No. 337, fixes a cold stare, lets out a loud snort and waggles his sharp horns, ready to protect his harem and offspring. The females, with equally sharp horns, attempt to lead the visitors away from their babies, cat-sized creatures tucked in small crevasses in the ground. It's a matter of genetics: For eons, the herd's ancestors roamed the Arabian Peninsula, honing their survival skills.

During most of the 1970s, the American red wolf--which once roamed from the Atlantic Coast to Texas and from the Everglades as far north as the Ohio River--was precariously near extinction. Now, in an ambitious effort to return the reclusive creature to the wild, two pairs bred in captivity have been conditioned since January in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, for release in the Appalachian highlands.

I admit it: I fall in love easily. First, it was with a 268-pound guy. Despite his youth, he was gray and wrinkled. But there were others as the day wore on. One had a face like a horse. Another was nice-enough looking, but that neck — oh, heavens, that neck. And yet another was way too fast for me. Oh, baby. Or, more correctly, babies. These were all animal babies — an African elephant, a zebra, a giraffe and a cheetah, respectively — I saw on a two-hour photo caravan at the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park.

Isolated far away from the daily crowds at the San Francisco Zoo, two young bald eagles huddled on a Monterey Cypress and glared at the visitor peeking through an observation slit. Their head feathers raised like the hackles of a angry dog. "They are very skittish around humans," whispered George Carpenter, a zoo biologist who studies the breeding behavior of bald eagles, "which is good. You have to be very careful. If this was the breeding season we wouldn't even be talking out here."

After nearly a decade in protective custody, the endangered California condor--which once ranged across the North American continent--will be returned to the wild in October, a team of scientists announced Friday. Hoinewut and Chocuyens, two condor chicks from the Los Angeles Zoo and San Diego Wild Animal Park respectively, will be 6 months old when airlifted into the rugged Sespe wilderness of Los Padres National Forest in Ventura County, 75 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

A slender red wolf paces back and forth on long, stick legs, her eyes fastened on her human keeper just beyond the cyclone fence of her enclosure. It is a tree-shaded affair, with an artificial brook made of concrete and recycled water. Although on display at the Los Angeles Zoo, the animal has a higher purpose than mere exhibition.

On one thing all sides agree: The giant panda, that childlike, overstuffed animal with the haunting black circles around its eyes, must be rescued from the ravages of modernity in its native China. After that, agreement tends to break down. As a result, the most popular animal ever brought to American zoos has all but disappeared from public view.

About 25 environmentalists and members of the Chumash Indian tribe quietly demonstrated outside the Los Angeles Zoo in protest against the captive breeding of California condors. The demonstrators expressed the view that the captive breeding program, which now involves 25 of the huge birds, will increase the chances that the condors will become extinct.

Avian specialists from the San Diego Zoo will assist scientists in Hawaii in a last-ditch effort to save one of the world's rarest birds, the po'ouli, found only on the slopes of Haleakala Volcano in Maui, Hawaii. Only two females and one male are known to exist. The zoo, which has a program to help save Hawaii's endangered forest bird species, will be part of a captive breeding program in Hawaii.

A rare blue butterfly took flight Saturday morning on a wind-swept bluff of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Then another. And then another. A cluster of conservationists watched in awe. In all, 80 endangered butterflies, each bred in captivity, ventured into the wild for the first time. It was a big step toward saving the Palos Verdes blue butterfly from extinction. The peninsula had been its only home on the planet until 20th century development bulldozed its habitat. "I'm just ecstatic to be here," biologist Jana Johnson told the gathering moments before the cobalt-blue butterflies were set free in a gully of San Pedro's Friendship Park.

Some like it hot. Apparently, the endangered mountain yellow-legged frog is not among them. The 3-inch-long amphibians much prefer it cold as melting snow. So conservationists at the San Diego Zoo have placed two dozen of the nearly extinct frogs in refrigerators they joshingly refer to as "Valentine's Day retreats" in hopes the amphibians will emerge with the urge. To mate, that is. The big chill at the zoo's Institute for Conservation Research represents one of the nation's most ambitious wildlife reintroduction experiments.

In the end, Hannibal did not administer the fatal bite to his mate's neck. And Jao Chu did not immediately kill their offspring, as is often the case. And so, early Tuesday, despite murderous tendencies in the captive species, two newborn clouded leopard cubs were found alive, well and squealing at the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Va.

In the darkness of a new moon, a dozen black-crowned night herons landed on a San Pedro beach and stood like sentinels facing the open ocean. "That's a good sign," whispered marine biology researcher Jenn Corpuz, 26. "The herons know there is something coming." Suddenly, the surf shimmered with flashes of silver, and a few small, slender fish wriggled on shore, as if to size up the situation. Then thousands of fish began riding in on the swells and piling up on the beach in writhing clots.

Hidden by the darkness of a half-moon sky, nine students and their biologist mentor waded through waist-high brush one night last week, hunting for yellow-flowering deer weed to shelter one of the rarest butterflies in America. One student hugged a big, red cylindrical cooler. "I come bearing endangered species," she said. It was no joke. Inside the cooler fluttered dozens of Palos Verdes blues, thumbnail-sized butterflies, all bred in captivity, most just a few days old.

Ten Santa Cruz Island fox pups have been released into the wild, the last of a group reared in captivity as part of an effort to restore the endangered species. The pups scurried into wooded canyons Monday in the middle of the 96-square-mile island off the Ventura County coast, said Tim Coonan, a biologist with the National Park Service. There were once 1,500 foxes, but their numbers dwindled to as few as 80 because of pigs and turkeys brought to the island by ranchers.

A California condor chick hatched Tuesday at the Los Angeles Zoo, bringing the total of the endangered birds to 73. The chick, whose sex will be determined in three months by chromosome analysis, was the offspring of Topa Topa, captured in the wild in 1967, and his mate, Malibu. The chick had minced mouse for its first meal. Topa Topa was one of 14 California condors captured in the wild to launch a captive breeding program to save the species. He was the last of the 14 to reproduce.

The endangered California condor will be bred and raised next year in Idaho, in addition to Los Angeles and San Diego, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said Friday. There are now 63 of the giant vultures alive. One is roaming the hills and skies of the Sespe Condor Sanctuary north of Fillmore, six more are being held at a compound there awaiting release next month, and the remaining birds are being raised in the captive breeding programs at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo.

A city aquarium has announced what it says is the first-ever birth in captivity of a Pacific angel shark, a sand-burrowing species resembling a ray that lives along the West Coast. Because of the difficulty of feeding angel sharks, divers are hand-feeding the pup, said Reid Withrow, director of husbandry at Aquarium of the Bay.

Papa salmon plus mama salmon equals. . . baby trout? Japanese scientists put a new spin on surrogate parenting as they engineered one fish species to produce another, in a quest to preserve endangered fish. Next month, Idaho scientists will try to produce sockeye salmon, highly endangered in that state, using more plentiful trout as surrogate parents.