2 Missing Condors Might Have Perished in October’s Piru Blaze

Two California condors that were seen in the vicinity of the 64,000-acre Piru fire in October have not been spotted again by wildlife officials, who fear they may have perished.

The birds were among the 39 living in a number of wild regions in California, where the species nearly died out in the mid-1980s.

Known as No. 202 and No. 268, the pair were seen at the rugged Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in northern Ventura County the day before the fire erupted on Oct. 23, said Maeton Freel, a wildlife biologist for Los Padres National Forest.

However, neither 202, a 5-year-old male, nor 268, a 2-year-old female, has been sighted since then. Regularly monitored by wildlife experts at Hopper Mountain, the condors are equipped with radio devices but no signals have been picked up.

“It’s presumed something happened to these two, but we’re not sure what it was,” Freel said. “We don’t know whether they’re lost or just not locatable yet.”

The huge, gliding condor evolved amid forest fires, but the raging heat, intense updrafts and disorienting smoke of the Piru blaze may have overcome 202 and 268.

“They should have been able to maneuver their way out of most situations, but it’s possible they got caught in a weird wind event and succumbed to the fire,” Freel said.

However, he added, it also may be that the birds’ radio transmitters stopped working.

“Batteries go dead, units malfunction, things happen,” Freel said, pointing out that the radios don’t always work in the caves and canyons that condors favor.

The next generation of tracking devices will be high-tech units that use satellites that can pinpoint a condor’s latitude, longitude, altitude and even flight speed, he said.

Ranging hundreds of miles, the birds have been known to go AWOL for weeks at a time. Even so, an absence of more than two months is unusual, Freel said.

Ground crews in the 2,400-acre Hopper Mountain refuge six miles north of Fillmore have been looking for the birds. The rest of the roughly two dozen that frequented the area before the fire have been accounted for, Freel said.

If the pair died, they would join a string of recent losses. In July, a 1-year-old condor at Hopper Mountain was killed by coyotes, a month after being released into the wilderness. In February, a poacher fatally shot a condor in Kern County. In October 2002, three condor chicks -- the first to hatch in the wild in 18 years -- died.

On the other hand, such losses are not as devastating to the species as they were just a few years ago.

With breeding programs in zoos, wildlife officials are bringing 25 to 30 new California condors into the world annually, Freel said. In 1987, the species had dwindled to just one breeding pair.

Directed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the government’s $35-million condor restoration program has been criticized for allowing the birds too much time in unnatural settings and too much contact with humans. Curious by nature, condors have died from sipping antifreeze, eating the remnants of lead ammunition, digesting bits of scrap metal and perching on high-voltage wires.

However, the program’s supporters say such accidents come with the territory. Only with intensive management will the species again be self-sustaining, they contend.

The population of condors introduced into the wild includes five in Baja California, 40 in Arizona and 39 in California -- if the two missing birds are still alive.