The Californian condor, once near extinction, soars above the Sespe Wilderness. Photo © Chuck Graham
On a chilly December day I followed the trail along Sespe Creek toward the high peaks. Every step I took churned up plumes of ash, and canyon breezes stirred up dust devils that swirled around the burned-out cottonwood and oak trees. A persistent haze hung in the air, masking the noonday sun, and it looked as if a bomb had exploded. I had taken many hiking and backpacking trips into southern California’s Sespe Wilderness, but I barely recognized the area two months after fire had blazed over its rugged landscape.
The Day Fire on the Los Padres National Forest was one of the largest wildfires in the state’s history. It began on Labor Day 2006 and was contained about a month later. More than 4,000 firefighters fought the blaze, which investigators say was started accidentally by someone burning trash. The fire cost more than $73 million to tame, and burned 162,702 acres.
It’s common to describe a charred wilderness landscape as devastated, but in this case the word isn’t accurate.
“For chaparral and grassland habitats like the Sespe, these fires help create better habitat conditions that open up areas that have been choked by vegetation,” says Chris Barr, refuge manager for the condor recovery program for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Sevice.
The fire, moving hot and fast, eliminated overgrown chaparral that for decades created a canopy that stunted any new growth beneath it. Cleared of the canopy, the area is now more hospitable to two of the rarest creatures in the Los Padres National Forest: the desert bighorn sheep and the critically endangered California condor. The Sespe Wilderness, the westernmost point in the historic range of bighorn sheep and one of the last sanctuaries of the condor, now has an open canopy which will increase forage opportunities for both species. It will also improve visibility for the bighorns, and thereby help them evade mountain lions.
“Bighorns have the innate drive to go in a certain direction when spooked,” says Maeton Freel, wildlife biologist for the Los Padres National Forest. “Before, they didn’t know where the escape terrain was, and mountain lions were picking them off.”
Regeneration
Desert bighorn sheep disappeared from this region in the 1880s, due to disease and over-hunting. In 1985 and 1987, the California Department of Fish and Game replenished the Sespe with thirty-seven bighorns from herds in the San Gabriel Mountains, east of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, after each release of the radio-collared animals, raging windstorms scattered the bewildered herds. Bighorns depend on their keen vision to locate predators, and like most herbivores, they rally around one another when threatened. Without safety in numbers, the sheep were very vulnerable to predation.
California Fish and Game’s original goal was to have self-sustaining herds totaling 100 animals in the Sespe wilderness, but by 1995 it appeared its efforts to repopulate the area had failed. Radio collars were nearly silent, and land and aerial surveys located fewer and fewer sheep. But in the late 1990s, backpackers reported seeing bighorns in the Sespe Hot Springs region. Surveys confirmed the presence of about twenty sheep, but biologists weren’t able to track them consistently.
In the wake of the recent fire, biologists hope the cleared landscape will help boost the bighorn population. The removal of chaparral allows abundant growth of native grasses and other plant species that the sheep favor, including wild oats, barley, fescue and giant hyssop. The more open landscape may also enable survey crews to get a better read on the still-undetermined population of desert bighorn, but there’s a lot of ground to cover in this remote wilderness.
“There really isn’t an accurate way to determine the population right now,” says Rebecca Barboza, a wildlife biologist for the Department of Fish and Game. “Only because this would entail radio-collaring animals.”
During a survey in the Sespe Wilderness a few years ago, Barboza saw game trails where one might not expect mule deer, due to the steep, rocky terrain, and she is hoping they were made by bighorn sheep. The region is off-limits to helicopters because it’s located in the Sespe Condor Sanctuary.
“There’s some really good country in the condor sanctuary,” she said. “I hope they would go there. There’s good lambing habitat.”
Remnants of the Pleistocene
The Sespe is also home to more than half of the wild California condor population. The critically endangered bird covers an average of 100 to 150 miles a day, soaring in thermal updrafts while foraging for carrion across the Sespe Wilderness and beyond.
For decades, the population of North America’s largest flying land bird decreased due to extensive habitat loss and lead poisoning. In 1987 there were only fourteen condors remaining in the wild, all in the Los Padres National Forest. Biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured the birds and instituted a captive breeding program. Now there are about 100 condors living in the wild from Big Sur to Baja.
Portions of the Sespe are honeycombed with sandstone cliffs and towering pinnacles that offer prime nesting and roosting habitat for condors. Like the bighorn sheep, the prehistoric raptor with its pumpkin-colored head relies on keen eyesight, which it needs to locate mule deer and cattle carcasses. Since the federal Fish and Wildlife Service began releasing captive-bred condors into the wild in 1992, biologists have periodically left stillborn calf carcasses in the region’s grasslands to encourage foraging behavior. Biologists hope the fire-created clearings will make finding food easier for the condor.
Scaling the 6,666-foot San Rafael Peak, I scrambled up a gritty sandstone cathedral jutting out of the black earth, and tried to hoist myself into a narrow notch. I looked up to see a desert bighorn ram standing over me. For a millisecond we gazed at each other, only ten feet apart. Then the powerful herbivore was off, traversing the loose scree slope as easily as a flight of stairs. The fire-cleared landscape allowed me to keep an eye on the ram. When it reached the knife ridge above me, it huddled with seven of its herd. I watched as the group nimbly worked its way to the summit of the barren peak, an escape route only bighorns could manage so effortlessly.