Six young California condors peeked out of boxes Tuesday at their new Arizona home - a snowy plateau overlooking the mile-deep chasm of the Grand Canyon.
It's a perfect perch for these largest and rarest of North American birds, which will remain in a large pen here until they are old enough to extend their 9-foot wingspans and fly this December.And when the birds, the products of an intense recovery and reintroduction effort, do fly free, it will mark the first time in 72 years that condors have soared over their ancient Arizona homeland.
From their holding pen, these 6-month-old birds see the same panorama that greeted their ancestors before the last Ice Age. Condor bones 11,000 years old, found in a nearby cave, show these birds once cruised the reddish canyon walls, searching for the remains of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers.
Unlike their Pleistocene Era peers, however, condors have somehow resisted extinction - but only barely.
After two centuries of being shot, poached and poisoned by European settlers, California condor numbers dwindled by 1985 to only nine birds, with none left in the wild by 1987.
A decade of successful breeding in captivity has brought the number of condors up to 121. And since 1992, they again have floated high above the coastal mountains of central California, with 17 successfully reintroduced into the wild.
To help ensure their survival, government and zoo biologists want to establish a second, independent wild population in Arizona, where a wild condor last was sighted near Williams in 1924.
"This release is really critical to the recovery of the species," said Robert Mesta, condor specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Biologists won't consider the condors out of danger until there are two separate populations in the wild - one in California and one in Arizona - each with at least 150 birds, including 15 breeding pairs.
Like other vultures, condors tend to flock together, sharing the carcasses they find. But this survival technique makes them vulnerable to toxic chemical leaks or other environmental hazards, even small ones, that can poison their water and food, Mesta said.
One of the condors released in California died after drinking antifreeze. Four others were electrocuted when they landed on utility lines.
Another major problem for condors, which can ride thermal updrafts and glide more than 100 miles a day, is that California's huge and growing human population means there are fewer large expanses of wild country.
That won't be a problem for the condors in Arizona. From their new home base on these Vermilion Cliffs between Page and Kanab, Utah, they will be surrounded by some of the nation's largest federal park preserves.
To the north are Bryce, Zion, Canyonlands, Glen Canyon and the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
But it is to the south, to the vastness of the Grand Canyon, that scientists will initially lure the condors.
At isolated feeding stations, they will provide the young condors with dead calves bought from local ranchers, or deer killed by traffic on the few highways that cross these majestic lands.
Some folks in this sparsely populated region fear the reintroduction of condors could mean restrictions on ranching, logging, mining and other development.
But a federal judge in Utah earlier this month struck down a lawsuit brought by San Juan County, saying the endangered birds will cause no land-use restrictions. State and federal officials believe condors will encourage tourism.
"This is a place where people will really be able to see them. They'll be hard to miss," said Nancy Kaufman, Southwest regional director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Southern Arizona already is the nation's No. 1 bird-watching location, according to Birders' World magazine.
And it should become easier to see condors in Arizona.
"We'd like to do it (release condors) every year if possible. The goal is to re-establish a flock in the Grand Canyon," said Jeff Cilek, vice president of the Peregrine Fund, which is managing the condor release in Arizona.