SAN JOSE, Calif. – As fires burn across Big Sur, flames and heavy smoke are threatening not just homes and businesses but some of the area's most famous residents: endangered California condors.
Biologists who have spent years painstakingly nurturing North America's largest bird back from the brink of extinction say so far none of the 82 condors that live in the Big Sur area has been killed by the Soberanes fire.
But the blaze — which began two weeks ago with an illegal campfire and on Saturday reached 55,600 acres, an area nearly twice the size of the city of San Francisco — already has destroyed one of the six stations where researchers leave food for condors.
As the fire moves slowly south across coastal Monterey County, toward rugged, remote sections of the Los Padres National Forest, its leading edge was about eight miles from three nests containing young condor chicks, as well as an important "condor sanctuary" site with pens, trailers and a cabin that scientists use to release condors that have been hatched in zoos.
"I am worried," said Kelly Sorenson, executive director of the Ventana Wildlife Society, a nonprofit group that leads condor recovery efforts. "Just because we had a few chicks in wild nests survive wildfires in the past doesn't mean it will happen again. It's definitely a concern."
Sorenson said that biologists are hoping they won't need to go in and rescue the young birds from the nests. The chicks are 3 to 4 months old, are being fed by their parents and won't be able to fly on their own for another two or three months, he said.
"At this point it wouldn't make sense to pull the chicks out of the nests because we'd have to figure out how to raise them," Sorenson said. "We might do it as a last resort."
California condors, whose wingspans can reach 9 feet, once ranged from British Columbia to Mexico. But because of habitat loss, hunting and lead poisoning, the population dwindled to just 22 birds nationwide by 1982. In a gamble to stave off extinction, federal biologists captured all remaining wild condors in 1987 and began breeding them in zoos. The offspring have been gradually released.
Today, the trends are positive. As of Dec. 31, there were 435 California condors in the world, an increase of nearly 20-fold over the past 30 years. Of those, 268 live in the wild, and 167 live in captivity in places where they are bred and hatched, such as the San Diego Zoo, Los Angeles Zoo, Oregon Zoo and the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho.
The wild condors live in Central California, where 82 birds split their time between Big Sur and Pinnacles National Park; in Southern California, mostly around Ventura and Santa Barbara counties; in the Grand Canyon and Utah; and in Baja, Mexico.
Last year, for the first time since the recovery effort began, more condors were born in the wild, 14, than died in the wild, 12. Scientists said that is an important milepost in their goal of removing the birds one day from the endangered species list, as other iconic species have such as the bald eagle, gray whale, American alligator and peregrine falcon.
Condors evolved with fire as a natural part of the landscape, said Steve Kirkland, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Ventura.
"There have been birds lost in past fires, but most of the birds that are mobile will fly away," said Kirkland, field coordinator for the California Condor Recovery Program. "If the fire came upon them suddenly with erratic winds, say early in the morning or late at night, that would be a riskier time. But this is a relatively slow moving fire. Hopefully they will get out of the area if they sense danger."