From You could say that the condors are Burnett's second family. "It's never even a matter of discussion when it comes to them," says his wife, Wendy. "He loves those birds."
The storm blew in on a gorgeous June day in Monterey, where Burnett and his family live. Burnett was in the yard playing with his 13-month-old son, Griffin; Wendy was gardening. As a fleet of dark clouds rolled up from the south, the family retreated inside their hillside home. The lightning display that followed was spectacular.
That worried Burnett. The woodlands were brittle with drought, and in Big Sur, 30 miles down the coast, a disease had turned half a million trees into kindling. A big wildfire was many seasons overdue. "This could be it," he said grimly to his wife.
Burnett knew that most of the 25 condors inhabiting Big Sur would be able to escape a fire on their own. But eight birds were locked in the Ventana compound's holding pen. If the flames reached them, they would die.
The storm had barely passed when Burnett's phone started ringing. A colleague, biologist Mike Tyner, had been tracking condor activity along Highway 1 and saw smoke rising from a hill above the redwoods. Ventana volunteer Duane Titus, who ran a wildlife rescue center with his wife, was monitoring fire-service communications on his scanner and said crews were fighting several blazes. Burnett's boss, Kelly Sorenson, was on the ridge near the condor pen; he, too, saw smoke plumes, as close as ten miles away.
The pen was located in a forest 17 miles off Highway 1, up an unpaved, winding service road. Under normal conditions, it would have taken three SUVs, five field crew members, and most of a day to move the captive condors—seven juveniles under two years old and an adult male named Hoi, who was helping prepare the youngsters for release. (Condors learn social and other survival skills from older, "mentor" birds.) Burnett hoped evacuation wouldn't be necessary, as it was best for the chicks to have minimal contact with humans.
Burnett and Sorenson both headed to the field office in Big Sur, where they spent the afternoon anxiously following the fire reports. By dinnertime, one fire had breached the ridgeline about five miles from the compound. The service road was now impassable. They'd need a helicopter to get to the pen; Burnett began calling around. But across the region, hundreds of blazes were spreading and merging, and he soon found that every qualified pilot was already booked for fire duty.
That night, Burnett fell into bed but couldn't sleep. How would he get those birds out alive?
The next morning, as the search for a flight continued, Duane Titus suggested that his wife, Rebecca Dmytryk, might help by reaching out to the network of contacts she'd built over her career in wildlife rescue. Within a few hours, she'd found a helicopter and a crew from the Coast Guard station in San Francisco. Burnett tapped biologist Tyner, 32, and Henry Bonifas, a 23-year-old intern, to accompany him on the mission. "This is above and beyond anything I've asked you to do," Burnett told them.
The three men met up with Lt. Harry Greene, 34; his copilot, Lt. Brad Donaldson, 28 (on loan from the Royal Australian Navy); and maintenance technician Casey Michaelson, 27, at Monterey's small airport and reviewed their plan. Greene and Donaldson would try to land at a bend in the dirt road about a mile from the condor pen; the forest was too dense to get closer. Burnett's team would hike in, wrangle each condor into a transport crate—an extra-large, customized dog kennel—and take it back to the chopper, which would ferry the birds to Monterey. The condors would then be taken to a refuge outside the fire zone.
The helicopter headed down the coast and turned inland. But as it approached the intended landing site, the pilots saw that they couldn't bring the chopper down. "The blades are going to hit the berm," Greene said. Burnett directed him to a fire emergency pad at the top of the ridge.
It was past 4:30 by the time they landed. Nightfall was less than four hours away, and the crew had orders not to fly after dark. They were three miles from the pen. The fire was getting closer. As Burnett hit the ground, all he could think was, We've got to keep moving.
As Burnett's team hustled down the dirt road, ash fell like snow around them. The only sound was the pounding of their boots—even the insects were quiet. They reached the compound just after five and managed to start up an old ATV to use as a transport for the birds. Tyner grabbed a chain saw from the toolshed and went to cut up a tree that had fallen across the road, while the other two men hauled the crates to the holding pen.
The pen was the size of a high school gym, furnished with stumps, snags, and branches for perching. They first went for Hoi, the 17-year-old mentor bird. He gave in easily, but his protégés were a challenge. Even at 18 months, condors have enormous wings, and their beaks and nails are razor-sharp. It took a half hour to capture the first chick and get the two kennels onto the ATV. Burnett took off with them.
He was waiting at the landing pad when the helicopter returned from a refueling run. Greene warned that they had time for only two trips to Monterey. Burnett sped back to the pen, returning 45 minutes later with two more chicks, and then, around 7:30, with two more. Michaelson managed to cram five kennels into the chopper.
Dusk was falling, and the fire was now a mile and a half away. "Be here at 8:30 with the rest of the birds," Greene called to Burnett over the engine's noise. "And be prepared: If we can't land, you'll have to leave them and we'll pick you up somewhere below the ridge." The chopper lifted off. Burnett put the kennel holding the sixth chick in a hollow near the helipad and hightailed it back to the compound.
Tyner and Bonifas had just captured the seventh condor when Burnett reached the pen. The eighth, the three-foot-tall No. 438, was leading them on a chase, launching herself from perch to perch to elude their grasp. "Come on, bird," the men coaxed as they darted after the chick. Five minutes remained before they were due back. Burnett finally scrambled up a ladder, grabbed 438 by her feet, and tossed her, against official protocol, to Tyner and Bonifas. She was netted and wrestled into the kennel. Burnett loaded up the ATV and leaped behind the wheel. But it wouldn't start.
Tyner, an ATV pro, took the driver's seat. While the others pushed the quad downhill toward the road, he shifted into second gear and the engine caught. "Don't stop till you get there!" Burnett yelled to Tyner as he took off on foot with Bonifas. They were halfway to the landing site and coughing from the smoke when Tyner returned for them. He'd seen no sign of the chopper. "We may have to carry those last three kennels down on our backs," Burnett said wearily. He and Bonifas hung on to the quad as Tyner drove them back to the helipad.
As they rounded the last bend, they heard the distant chop of rotors and saw lights in the murky dark. The helicopter was crawling up the ridge, searching for the pad. "Keep going," Burnett directed by radio. "One more peak and you're there."
It finally landed, and Michaelson hauled the last three kennels on board. "Let's go, let's go! Fire's coming!" he shouted. The engine howled as the chopper hurtled down the side of the ridge. The air was opaque. Would they find their way out? Burnett thought of his wife and child and wondered if he'd ever see them again. Then the helicopter burst through the acrid smoke and into a clear night. Looking back, the men saw ribbons of flame glowing on the hillsides. They—and the condors—were safe.
When the team arrived at the Monterey airport, a small but joyous crowd rushed onto the tarmac. Sorenson, Dmytryk, and Titus helped a couple of government biologists load the birds into a van, which took them 70 miles inland to a pen at Pinnacles National Monument.
The youngsters continued their tutelage with Hoi until they were ready for the wild. Three were released last fall at the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in Southern California; the other four, in November and December, into the outback of Pinnacles. In March, Burnett watched one of the birds—a female known as No. 431—soar over the mountains and into Big Sur, her black and white wings huge against the sky. "Seeing them make it as condors—that's the moment you live for," he says, smiling. "That's when you know what you've done has made a difference."
The Basin Complex fire burned 163,000 acres and consumed nearly 60 structures, including the Big Sur holding pen. Two free-flying condors were lost. Soon afterward, when Burnett climbed a charred redwood to investigate why a pair of condors kept returning to it, he made an astonishing discovery: In a hollow at the top of the 200-foot tree, a six-month-old condor chick had somehow survived the blaze. It was, says Burnett, "like the phoenix sitting there in a bed of ashes."
Condor Lore
- The California condor has the largest wingspan of any land bird in North America. Its closest relative is the slightly larger Andean condor of South America.
- Despite the name, California condors were found in pioneer days as far east as Colorado. Today, about 175 birds live free, mostly in the mountains of California and northern Mexico, Arizona's Grand Canyon, and Utah's Zion National Park.
- Captive-born chicks spend their first year or so in zoos, where they're sometimes fed by hand puppets disguised as condors. To prepare for their release into the wild, they live for at least six months in remote outdoor pens, where they're mentored by adult birds.
- Condor pairs reproduce only once every two years, giving birth to a single chick. Individuals can live past 50 years.