Flight from the Fire: A Dramatic Condor Rescue

The forest was ablaze and eight rare condors were trapped. Joe Burnett led the team to save their lives.

With its hunched shoulders and bald, wrinkled head, the California condor is not much to look at up close. In flight, however, the giant scavenger transforms itself into the majestic thunderbird of Native American lore, its wingspan stretching to ten feet. The mighty birds once ranged from western Canada to Mexico, but their numbers dwindled as humans invaded their habitats. Settlers often shot condors on sight, curio collectors stole their eggs, and the birds got lead poisoning from eating bullet-riddled animal carcasses. By the mid-1980s, only nine condors remained in the wild, all in California. Today, despite a two-decade effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to breed the birds in captivity and release them into the wild, fewer than 175 California condors are flying free. Wildlife biologist Joe Burnett, 38, got hooked on condors in college. For the past 13 years (except for a stint at the Oregon Zoo), he has been the condor field supervisor for the Ventana Wildlife Society, in charge of repopulating the forests of Central California with the species. Condor Joe, as the locals call him, helped Ventana build a compound in the mountains of Big Sur, with a pen for holding and training young condors. He tags them and fits them with transmitters before they're freed and traps them regularly for medical checkups. He hauls dead calves up steep slopes to make sure his charges get a healthy breakfast.

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.

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