Condor Chicks Evacuated as Wildfire Advances on Sanctuary

• Thousands of Northern California Blazes Move Southward with No End in Sight

BY REBECCA DMYTRYK

It was pretty amazing. We were watching last week’s lightning storm roll into Monterey Bay. It had been a brutally hot day until high clouds moved in from the West. Within minutes it turned cool and breezy. We hiked to the top of our hill where we have a panoramic view of the bay. The clouds were wild—one dark formation looked like a creepy cob­web. Lightning, thun­der, wind, and a few drops of rain. Sand devils rose from the dunes at Moss Landing.
A branched strike of light­ning ignited the Corral de Tierra fire in Carmel Valley. While small grass fires flared up all around the Monterey Bay area, farther south, along the coast of Big Sur, lightning ignited heavy brush in a small rugged canyon. That fire became know as the Gallery Fire. Since June 21, the Gallery Fire merged with the Basin Fire in the Ventana Wilderness. Firefighters have predicted that it will merge with the Indians Fire—a blaze start­ed by a campfire June 8.
Nearly 90,000 acres of wil­derness have been de­stroyed. In the early stages of the Gallery Fire it was not clear whether a group of captive California con­dors should be disturbed and moved from their flight pens in a remote area, just south of Big Sur. The eight birds, one adult male mentor and seven juveniles, are part of a re­in­troduction program ad­ministrated by the Ventana Wildlife Society.
Their secluded condor re­­lease site is used to pre­pare captive-born con­dors for life in the wild—ac­cli­mating them to their sur­roundings and allowing them to socialize with wild condors that visit the fac­ility. Hoi, the adult condor, mentors the youngsters, teaching them social eti­quette and survival skills. With only 315 California con­dors in existence, fewer than half living in the wild, these birds are inval­uable to the species’ fu­ture.
By Sunday morn­ing, the fire was shifting direc­tions and gaining ground. The call was made to evac­uate the condors. By that time however, Highway 1 had been closed and all road ac­cess to the condor sanc­tuary was shut down. The on­ly way they could be res­cued was by helicop­ter. Fire resources were spread thin tending to the near 1100 blazes in California.
Having called upon the Coast Guard once before for a sea lion rescue off Point Dume, I decided to give them a jingle. Just as I’d thought, they were eager to help if only they could find an available air crew and get approval for the mission. I went ahead and doubled my chances by also calling the state Office of Emer­gen­cy Ser­vices as the Coast Guard suggested. I found that they too were willing to look into allocating re­sources to help the birds. By early afternoon we received the word. It was a go. A Coast Guard unit had been assigned to the mission, and the Gover­nor’s Office called with in­structions to rescue the birds from danger.
The race was on—a race against the fire, the weath­er, and daylight. By 3:45 p.m., the first leg of the opera­tion was underway. A team of three biologists from Ventana Wildlife So­ciety boarded the Coast Guard helicopter at Mon­terey Jet Center air­field. They were going to be dropped off as close to the facility as possible, hike in, confine the birds into dog crates, and use their one ATV to transport the ani­mals back to the landing pad. They had four and a half hours of daylight left.
Joe Burnett, senior wildlife biologist for the condor program led the rescue team. Joining him was Mike Tyner and Henry Bonifas. In over 90-degree temperature, the young men made their way down the dirt road toward the condors—a 2.5-mile trek. Ash floated down like snow. The air was still and an eerie silence gripped the canyon. The team worked quickly to capture and cage each of the nearly 20-pound birds.
It was not easy work as the birds, with their 9-foot wing span, could easi­ly fly from one end of their flight pen to the next. Once in their German shep­herd-size dog crates, the birds were carted up the wind­ing, craggy dirt road to the rendezvous point, two at a time. Over three hours passed before the first group of five condors was airlifted out of danger. They were quickly off­loaded to an awaiting vehi­­cle that would take them to Pinnacles National Monument to be housed in condor enclosures there. The Wildlife Society and Pinnacles have collabor­ated on condor recovery since 2003.
At day’s end, the re­main­ing condors and their weary rescuers landed safe­ly out of harm’s way, thanks to the tremendous effort by the U.S. Coast Guard. The fire swept across the canyon two days after the evacuation. It is still not known what, if anything, remains of the society’s condor flight pens and research cabin.
While the rescued con­dors are safely housed at Pin­nacles, attention has turned to the fate of the wild-flying condors, in­cluding three chicks. The condors are fitted with rad­io transmitters. Joe and his team are tracking the birds daily, hoping to con­firm that all forty or so birds are still alive. At this point, one female, Condor 222, is unaccounted for. She is the mother of one of the chicks. Joe spotted her in a snag near the facility as the last of the birds were evacuated. Condors, like most diurnal birds, do not fly at night. She may have stayed roosting as the fire advanced. As for the three chicks, we know that two are safe in their nests. The third—its condition is un­known. The fire burned everything around its red­wood home. We hope its old growth home pro­tected it from the fire and heat.
As for the facility, with luck, it survived. If not, it will mean starting over to rebuild the enclosures and research facility. Anyone in­terested in getting in­volved or helping to sup­port this program, can con­tact Ventana Wildlife Soci­ety’s executive director, Kelly Sorenson, at 831-455-9514.