The Timber Fire is ravaging through California Condor habitat. Photo: Tim Huntington//Ventana Wildlife Society
A conservation group believes that a California Condor nest remains unscathed after the Timber Fire ripped through the area in Big Sur. While the nest isn’t currently occupied, condors used it to raise young in the past, and other condors had visited the location in the weeks before the fire, ahead of the nesting season.
The Ventana Wildlife Society, a nonprofit conservation organization in Central California, had installed a camera pointing at the nest in a burned-out hollow of a redwood tree in Big Sur. They say early indications show that while the equipment on the forest floor was burned, it appears that the foliage in the canopy, where the nest is located, was spared. Redwood trees have thick bark and chemicals that act as a retardant to survive wildfires.
The nest was used to hatch a condor in 2023, and the condor raised in it, called Jade, recently came back to visit in the organization’s first documented case of a juvenile revisiting the nest it was born in.
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In 1987, the California Condor nearly went extinct. The last wild bird was captured, joining 26 other individuals, also in captivity, as the last remaining individuals of the species. In the late ’80s, the San Diego Zoo successfully bred captive condors, and in the early ’90s, conservationists began reintroducing the birds to the wild in Southern California and Arizona.
In 1997, Ventana Wildlife Society began releasing the birds on California’s Central Coast. Today, there are 607 condors total, 392 of which live in the wild.
The condors began nesting in a Big Sur redwood in 2006, and today 117 of the birds call the Central Coast home. You can watch live feeds of condor nests and sanctuaries on Ventana Wildlife Society’s site.
