The Birds and the Beasts Were There

16 Fire on the Mountains

It was like the fringe of a bombed area. The houses were still standing but deserted. In one driveway a late-model sedan was parked with a small U-Haul trailer attached to the rear bumper. The trailer, heaped with clothes and bedding, had been left unprotected and the top layer of stuff was black with ashes. The sedan, however, was carefully covered with a tarpaulin. Perhaps its owner was a veteran of the disastrous 1955 Refugio fire, when a great many of us learned that ashes falling through atmospheric moisture made a lime mixture which ruined even the toughest paint.

Halfway around Chelham Way was a narrow black-top road leading to Westmont College. A locked gate kept the road unused except in emergencies. Beyond the gate, which had been opened, I could see a large section of the athletic field where the main firecamp had been set up the previous day. Here, where Ken and I used to walk our dogs, where we watched robins in winter and track meets in spring, this place meant for nothing more than games was now headquarters for hundreds of men, a kind of instant village. Here they ate at canteen tents, slept on the ground, received first aid for burns and cuts, were sent off in helicopters, fire trucks, buses, pickups, jeeps, and brought back to begin the cycle all over again.

The noise was deafening, most of it caused by the arrival and departure of helicopters and the shriek of sirens and blare of loudspeakers. The “helitack” units of the Forest Service consisted of the pilots themselves, the fire jumpers wearing heavy canvas suits to protect them when they leaped into the brush, and ground crews, in orange shirts and helmets, whose job was to prime and space the copters and keep them out of each other’s downdraft.

The scene, with its backdrop of blazing mountains, was unreal to me. Even the wounded men being brought in by helicopter looked like extras from the Warner Brothers back lot and the sirens of the ambulances as they left the field seemed like part of a sound track. The dogs knew better. They began to whine, so I let them out of the car and told them to go and find Ken. They didn’t hesitate. It was a good place to get away from.

Beyond the road leading into the firecamp was the top of our canyon. This part, which belonged to Westmont College and had no structures on it, had been completely burned. The ancient oak trees were black skeletons rising from grey ashes, and many eucalyptus, cypresses and Monterey pines had been reduced to stumps, some still smoldering. But where the row of houses began, along each side of the canyon, the burning had terminated. There was no evidence that the area had been wetted down nor any reddish stains indicating the use of fire retardant; no firebreak had been bulldozed and no hose laid. Yet at that one particular point the fire had stopped.

I learned later what had happened. At two-thirty in the morning, just when all hope of saving our canyon had been abandoned, the santana ceased as abruptly as it began and the wind pressed in from the sea, cool and moist. Temperatures dropped, humidity rose, and the flames were pushed back toward the mountains. It was during this lull that the Los Angeles Herald Examiner went to press with the front-page headlines “Santa Barbara Safe. Fire Shifts: 18 Homes Lost.” By the time I got to read those headlines Santa Barbara was surrounded on three sides by an inferno and a hundred more houses had been lost.

I stopped the car. Through the binoculars I kept in the glove compartment I examined hollows where smoke was still rising and stumps still smoldering unattended. At any moment they could burst into flames again and the santana could return. It had taken a miracle to save our canyon and there was probably only one to a customer. I rushed home to call the fire department.

Ken was asleep on the living-room davenport, a scribbled note on the coffee table beside him instructing me to wake him up when necessary. He didn’t stir even under the barrage of dog greetings.

Most of the telephones in the region were out of commission by this time. Ours was still working, though it failed to solve much. The fire department, I was told, had no trucks and no men available; people spotting areas which were still smoking were urged to cover them with dirt and/or douse them with water. I grabbed a shovel and a length of garden hose and headed back up the road.

During the windless morning the fire went through a semi-quiescent phase. There was unofficial talk of “early containment,” and a few evacuees began returning. Though the area where I was working still smoldered in places, other people had arrived to assist and the general picture looked good. By noon I felt secure enough to go home for some lunch. The only wildlife I’d seen all morning was an indignant family of acorn woodpeckers living in a nearby telephone pole, and a badly frightened and half-singed fox who came scurrying up from the bottom of the canyon.

Over tea and sandwiches Ken told me how he’d spent the night dousing sparks and embers that fell on the roof and in the underbrush. He had done his job well. Too well. The tea tree’s natural tendency to lean had been encouraged by the excessive water and it now lay on its side on the ground. Many trees were lost to fire during that week; our tea tree was probably the only one lost to flood.

We were finishing lunch when my sister called to tell us the fire had started on another rampage. By midafternoon the “early containment” theory had been blown sky high — and sky high turned out to be the precise description. The flames jumped El Camino Cielo, the sky road, and were racing down the other side of the ridge, with nothing whatever to stop them. Ten borate bombers were in operation, but dense smoke and wind conditions had grounded all of them and the fire roared unchecked into the back country, Santa Barbara’s vulnerable watershed.

El Camino Cielo was the road along the top of the first main ridge, starting at the east end of Montecito and continuing west past the city of Santa Barbara, San Marcos Pass, Santa Ynez Peak, its highest point at 4292 feet, and ending at Refugio Pass. Along this sky road, winter birdwatchers were apt to see mountain species which seldom appeared in the city itself — a Clark nutcracker noisily prying open the scales of a pine cone; a varied thrush standing in regal silence underneath a live oak, ignoring the raucous challenges of Steller jays; golden-crowned kinglets and brown creepers, mountain chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches, and sometimes a large garrulous flock of those erratic wanderers, the piñon jays.

The previous December, Jewell Kriger and I had done some advance scouting along Camino Cielo preparing for the Audubon Christmas bird count and we had come across a Townsend solitaire fly catching in the chamise and scrub oak along the sides of the road. A quarter of a mile beyond we found another solitaire. These birds are rarely found on a coastal bird count and we wanted to make sure that at least one of the solitaires would be located when the proper time arrived. Camino Cielo was not part of our regular territory — we were scouting it for Dr. Mary Erickson, ornithologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Mary was to head the group covering the area on actual count day, but she was too busy to do any preliminary looking.

The usual procedure in a situation like this was to note the mileage, and if the find was especially important, like the pygmy owls’ nest earlier in the year, to mark the spot with something that would attract attention without rousing the wrath of anti-litter-buggers. And others. (I mention “others” because on one occasion, to mark the whereabouts of a pair of black-chinned sparrows, I had carefully built a small mound out of stones, the best material on hand. Half our Audubon Society fell over the stones, and by the time the excitement subsided, the black-chinned sparrows were far away and glad of it.)

Near the pygmy owls’ nest we’d been lucky enough to pick up a good-sized piece of board painted red. We couldn’t expect such luck to be repeated, and it wasn’t. We found no marker in the area that would be readily visible from a moving car. Two more factors were against the Townsend solitaires appearing on our Christmas count. The speedometer on Jewell’s car was out of order and the previous weekend Russ Kriger had done one of his enthusiastic cleanup jobs on the car’s interior. A search through the glove compartment and the trunk, and even behind the seats, revealed nothing useable as a marker — no polishing cloth or chamois, no piece of rope or empty bottle, no last summer’s beach hat or last winter’s scarf. I looked at Jewell. She was wearing a white shirt and capris and a yellow sweater the exact shade of the band across the tip of a waxwing’s tail.

“Have you ever noticed,” I said, “how easy it is to identify a flock of cedar waxwings from a distance? The yellow tailbands show up very conspicuously.”

“So?”

“Experiments have shown that yellow is the color most easily seen from the greatest distance.”

“Well, you can forget the experiments,” Jewell said. “This sweater happens to have been a gift from one of my favorite relatives. It’s practically a keepsake.”

“You bought it yourself last year. I was with you, I even remember what it cost.”

“All right, all right. But I want it back.”

I assured her that she’d get it back, providing that during the next three days it wasn’t eaten by some animal, ruined by rain or blown away by the wind.

I tied the sweater to the top of a small ceanothus bush to mark the spot where we’d seen the first Townsend solitaire. To indicate the location of the second bird I was forced to sacrifice the lace hem of my slip, which I ripped off and impaled on a dead oak twig. The lace could easily be spotted by someone who was looking for it, and the sweater was conspicuous enough to prove that the experiments were right: if you want to be seen, wear yellow.

The following Sunday was count day. As usual there was a last-minute mixup and El Camino Cielo, which was to be Mary Erickson’s territory, was assigned to someone else. I didn’t know about this until the following Tuesday afternoon when the group captains and other interested people met in the junior library of the Museum of Natural History to make their official reports and add up the number of species and the number of birds seen between dawn and midnight on the Big Day. No one had remembered to have the heat turned on in the library ahead of time and we all sat around a table, huddled in coats.

The total number of species that year was 166, good enough to place us fifth in the nation, just one up on Freeport, Texas, and Oakland, California, tied at 165.

I greeted Mary Erickson, who was sitting across the table from me, and asked her what mountain species she’d found up on the ridge. She told me she’d been assigned to a beach and slough area instead.

A woman I’d never seen before volunteered the information that she had helped cover Camino Cielo, and except for a Steller’s jay and a varied thrush the place had been very disappointing, bird-wise. She’d obviously missed the Townsend solitaire, so I didn’t mention it.

The library was much warmer by this time and people were starting to take off their coats. The newcomer made a ceremony of removing hers, as though she wanted to make sure everyone noticed the costume she had on underneath. Everyone noticed all right. Especially me. Over a plaid wool skirt she wore a yellow sweater the exact shade of the band across the tip of a waxwing’s tail.

She saw me staring at the sweater. “Like it?”

I nodded.

“You’ll never believe where I got it.”

It was at that point, I suppose, when I should have taken her aside and explained the situation, but I didn’t. Instead, I listened in a kind of numb silence while she described to us how she’d seen the sweater, flapping in the wind, stopped the car and went over to investigate.

“... And there, tied to a bush, was this perfectly good sweater which turned out to be exactly my size. I couldn’t leave it out there in the weather to be ruined, so I brought it home and laundered it. And lo and behold, here it is and I am. It makes you wonder though, doesn’t it? What kind of a nut would leave a perfectly good sweater tied to a bush in the middle of nowhere?”

The answer seems inescapable: my kind.

The second night of the fire came on. At seven-thirty the heavy winds which had been blowing all afternoon at the upper elevations reached the foothills, and many of us found out for the first time what the term “wildfire” really meant. The whole mountain range seemed to explode, and flames were suddenly roaring down toward the city itself, through San Roque Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Mission Canyon, where the Botanic Garden was situated, all the way to Romero Canyon at the northeast end of Montecito. Because of the winds and approaching darkness the borate bombers stopped operating, and by this time, too, there was a drastic drop in water pressure.

Mass evacuations began, with some motels and hotels offering free rooms, and moving companies volunteering trucks and vans. Many people were double evacuees who’d fled Sycamore and Cold Springs canyons the first night and were now forced to flee their places of refuge; and before the fire was over, there was even a small band of very tired and jittery triple evacuees.

Our Chelham Way situation, which had been fairly good all day, was suddenly ominous again as the fire turned back in our direction. I thought of the house on Mountain Drive that had been saved in the afternoon only to be burned to the ground at midnight, and I wondered what similar ironies fate might be preparing for us.

Blessing counters and silver lining searchers found a plus in a negative: there were no sightseers. The noise from the fire camp, however, was incredible, a continuous roar of helicopters arriving and departing, the blaring of air to ground loudspeakers, the shrieking of ambulance and fire truck sirens. It was decibels rather than danger which strained my nerves to the breaking point and convinced Ken I’d be better off elsewhere.

Jo Ferry called to repeat her invitation of the previous night, but Ken decided that this time more constructive action was necessary than simply sending me off with the three dogs. He made arrangements with my brother-in-law, Clarence Schlagel, to bring his pickup truck over. After a series of delays caused by roadblocks Clarence arrived with the truck and we loaded it with our main valuables, manuscripts and books. We owned no art originals, no fine china or silver, no furs, and I wore my two pieces of jewelry, my wedding ring and my “lucky” bracelet which had been a present from our daughter, Linda, many years before. (Some people we knew, trapped in the fire by a sudden, violent change of wind, used their swimming pool as a depository for their silver, jewelry and furs, including a beaver jacket whose original owner wouldn’t have minded at all.)

It was agreed that I would go to the Schlagels’ house with the two smaller dogs, leaving Brandy with Ken. That way Ken could rest at intervals during the night knowing that Brandy would wake him up if anything unusual happened. German shepherds have a highly developed sense of propriety and when things go wrong they indicate their disapproval readily and unmistakably. Having Brandy in the room was like having an alarm clock set to go off in any emergency.

I rode in the truck with Johnny sitting quietly beside me and Rolls on my lap, trembling and whining all the way, partly out of fear and partly anticipation of spending another night chasing around the Ferrys’ house with Zorba. He was in for a disappointment: no chasing was allowed at the Schlagels’ place because there were too many chasers and chasees, and to avoid a complete shambles the animals had to be kept separated as much as possible. I counted four cats — a fat, ill-tempered orange tiger bought for Jane when she was a baby, an alley cat who realized he’d struck it rich and seldom left the davenport except to eat, and a pair of tabbies abandoned by a neighbor who’d moved away; Jane’s pygmy poodle with the giant name of Cha Cha José Morning Glory, my sister’s burro, Bobo, who had a loud, nervous hyena-type laugh he seemed to reserve especially for me, and Clarence’s four Shetland ponies. Sibling rivalry was rather intense on occasion, and the arrival of Johnny who loathed cats, and Rolls who hated horses and rapidly learned to hate burros, didn’t improve matters. There were many times during the night when I would have welcomed the sound of helicopters and fire sirens to drown out some of the yelping, yowling, whinnying, barking, and above all, Bobo’s wild bursts of laughter.

I woke up at dawn, leashed my two dogs and took them for a walk down the road toward the sea. When I faced that direction everything seemed quite normal. The light breeze smelled of salt and moist kelp. Mourning doves and brown towhees foraged along the sides of the road and bandtails gathered in the eucalyptus trees, getting ready to come down to feed. Brewer’s blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds were already heading for the Schlagels’ corral, Anna’s hummingbirds hurled themselves in and out of fuchsia blossoms and the bright red bushes of callistemon and torches of aloe, while half a dozen dogs vehemently denounced me and the company I kept.

When I turned to go back, the whole picture changed abruptly. I remember thinking, with terrible surprise as if I hadn’t been aware of it before, Our mountains are on fire, our forest is burning.

Returning to the house, I found my sister and brother-in-law in the kitchen making breakfast and listening to the radio. It had been a disastrous night. With winds in forty-five mile an hour gusts and flames towering as high as two hundred feet, the firefighters didn’t have a chance. Twenty-three thousand acres and over a hundred buildings were now destroyed and still the fire roared on, unchecked.

Fire, like war, is no respecter of age. Lost hysterical children wandered helplessly around Montecito village, and Wood Glen Hall, a home for the elderly at the opposite end of the fire area, was evacuated when the building filled with smoke.

Fire operates without any rules of fair play. Carol Davis of the University of California at Santa Barbara was helping the residents of Wood Glen Hall carry out their possessions when she learned that her own house had been destroyed and the only things saved were four books and a few pieces of clothing.

Fire makes no religious distinctions. The Catholic Sisters of Charity were burned out, the Episcopalian retreat on Mount Calvary lost a building, and a residence hall was destroyed at the Baptist Westmont College.

Fire has no regard for history or politics. Several buildings were burned to the ground at San Ysidro Ranch, the site of one of the old adobes constructed when Santa Barbara was under Mexican rule, and the place where, in 1953, a young Massachusetts senator named Kennedy brought his new bride, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, on their honeymoon.

Fire does not defer to beauty, either natural or man-made. A multimillion-dollar art collection belonging to Avery Brundage was destroyed, and some parts of the Botanic Garden were ravaged, including the majestic grove of sequoias, the largest of trees, where in the winter we could always find the tiniest of warblers, Townsend’s, and in the spring the almost as tiny Oregon juncos nested under the fragrant heart-shaped leaves of wild ginger.

Even the fire camp itself wasn’t spared. Flying embers started a blaze right in the middle of it and burned an area the size of a city lot before it was extinguished.

Around Santa Barbara that morning few people had a good word to say for Prometheus.

Ken phoned while I was feeding the dogs to tell us that he and Brandy and the house had come through the night in fair shape. Once again the flames had reached the head of our canyon and turned back as the winds shifted and though live coals had left holes in some roofs and all exterior areas were a mess, not a house on Chelham Way had been lost.

Other people weren’t so lucky. Of my fellow refugees at the Ferrys’ house, two were completely burned out: Robert M. Hutchins who lived in Romero Canyon in Montecito, and Hallock Hoffman who lived miles in the opposite direction above the Botanic Garden.

Every disaster has its share of ironies. Perhaps the Coyote fire seemed to behave more simply because they happened to people we knew. One of them involved an old wooden shed which was on the Romero Canyon property where the Hutchins had built their house several years before. The shed was being used to store the antiques Mrs. Hutchins had been gathering from various parts of the world for her art shop. When it became inevitable that fire was going to overrun the area, the antiques were removed by truck and taken to — where else? — the Ferrys’ house. No collector of ironies will be surprised to learn that the old shed, highly inflammable and containing nothing whatever of value, was the only building in the area untouched by flames.

One of the most eloquent of all the pictures taken during and after the Coyote fire was a shot of the formal gardens of the Brundage estate. It showed a marble Athena looking coolly and imperturbably through the bare black bones of trees toward the ruined mountains. No caption was needed; Ars longa, vita brevis.

During that early Thursday phone call, Ken also told me what I’d already guessed: during the night the Van Bergens’ house, which had been offered to us as a sanctuary from the fire, was completely destroyed. Afterwards I learned some of the details from the Van Bergens themselves and from people who’d been watching from below.

The house, situated on a knoll at an altitude of about seven hundred feet and constructed of glass and stucco in a distinctive, semicircular design, was easily identifiable for miles around. Dozens of observers saw the flames advancing on it and they were all unanimous on one point: the place did not burn, it was consumed — and with such rapidity that there was hardly a trace of smoke. Less than twenty minutes elapsed between the beginning of the fire and the end of the house. Evidence of the fantastic heat generated during that time was discovered later in the week when the Van Bergens started sifting through the ruins. The glass and the aluminum framing of the windows had oozed together in an incredible mess and the porcelain on the kitchen sink had completely melted. Since this stuff is applied at a temperature of 3000° F., firemen estimated the fire at that point to be between 3000° and 4000° F.

After breakfast, Johnny and Rolls and I said goodbye to the poodle, Cha Cha José Morning Glory, to Bobo, who let out one last triumphant guffaw, and to the cats Goldie, Neighbor, Neighbor Junior and Sneaky, and the ponies Heidi, Slipper, Tammy and Shasta. None of them showed the slightest regret at our departure.

It was still very early in the morning when I arrived home. For us the fire which had threatened on three sides was over. For others it was just starting. By noon 23,000 acres had burned, more than 2000 men were on the front and preparations were being made to start the backfire that was really to backfire and cause the first death.

Our house and yard, in spite of a covering of grey ash, looked beautiful to me because they were still there. Something was missing though. I noticed as soon as I walked in the front door that the ledge was vacant and the food I’d put out the previous night was untouched. The mourning doves and band-tailed pigeons, normally seen at any hour of any day, were missing. So were our unusual visitors, the ringed turtle dove and the white-winged dove. The only bird life in evidence was a small flock of green-backed goldfinches in the bath on the lower terrace. They were bathing merrily in the grey ash-coated water as if it were the clearest, freshest mountain brook.

The most obvious absence, however, and the most mysterious, was that of the scrub jays. I took some peanuts out to the wooden dish on the porch railing, a maneuver that under ordinary conditions would have set the canyon echoing with their harsh cries of, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!” and brought jays down from every tree and rooftop. Nothing happened. The acorn woodpeckers didn’t respond either, but I didn’t expect them to; it was now the final week of September, the month when the acorns were beginning to ripen and there was work to be done. The only bird who appeared for the peanuts was Houdunit, the brown towhee. This was predictable since he seldom ventured more than fifty feet from the house and knew all the things that took place in and around it almost before they had a chance to happen.

We were feeding about a dozen scrub jays at this time, most of whom had been raised on the ledge and were very tame. The word tame might give the impression of birds trained to sit on shoulders and do tricks and the like. That impression would be wrong. Our jays were tame in the sense that they were part of the landscape, like the eucalyptus trees and the cotoneasters; their voices were as familiar to us as Brandy’s basso-profundo bark or Johnny’s howling at sirens; our lives and their lives were entwined, so that you might say we were all part of the same biota.

In the course of the morning a number of the usual birds came to the ledge to feed — house finches, a pair of young song sparrows, cowbirds and blackbirds, a lone flicker and a mockingbird. The scrub jays remained absent, as did the band-tailed pigeons, the three species of dove and two house wrens who’d been with us since spring. We never saw any of them again.

When a major disaster is over, there are immediate estimates of losses in terms of dollars and cents. The Coyote fire, which continued for more than a week, is said to have been started by a woman burning rubbish to avoid the admission fee to the county dump. She saved fifty cents. It cost the rest of us $20,000,000.

The cost in wildlife was much more difficult to assess. The creatures given sanctuary by the Humane Society ranged from African goats to ducks and peacocks, but these were pets. Reports of actual wildlife, especially of birds, were few and vague. An account of birds flying up out of the burning trees and falling back into the flames, I was unable to verify — let alone check what kinds of birds and whether they were all the same and how many there were, and so on. The number of injured birds brought to the Museum of Natural History was no higher during and after the fire than before it.

Bill Botwright of the Santa Barbara News-Press, describing his patrol of the fire area during the first night’s lull when the santana stopped, told of seeing “two large birds blundering blindly in the red glare.” He thought they were crows, but they could have been band-tailed pigeons which are only slightly smaller, fourteen to sixteen inches as compared with the crows’ seventeen to twenty-one inches. Dick Smith, of the same newspaper, who covered the rugged back-country regions in his triple roles of artist, topographer and naturalist, told us that the only birds he saw actually fleeing the fire were quail running out of the underbrush, and that on dozens of trips into the area after the fire he didn’t come across a single carcass or skeleton of a bird. This doesn’t mean that no birds were destroyed, only that evidence of such destruction was reduced to ash. Bird bones are light and hollow; they can be, and often by accident have been, cremated in a backyard barbecue pit.

In the absence of eyewitness accounts and even one corpusdelicti, we had to depend on circumstantial evidence as well as facts. The main fact was that before the fire we had feeding on our ledge every day a flock of approximately a hundred band-tailed pigeons, half that many mourning doves, one white-winged and one turtle dove, ten or twelve scrub jays; and feeding in and under the shrubbery around the house, a pair of house wrens. None of these birds reappeared after the fire. (Our last sight of the Vaux’ swift on the first night of the fire has been described in an earlier chapter.)

A number of people have suggested that the disappearing birds sensed danger and flew away to a safer area. There are several reasons why I can’t believe this. If the pigeons, doves and jays took flight when danger was imminent, why didn’t the house finches, towhees, blackbirds, cowbirds, song sparrows, goldfinches, hummingbirds, thrashers, titmice, flickers and so on?

You would also expect that when the danger had passed, the birds that had fled would begin returning. The feeding station was their home, as far as wild birds can have a home. There they ate their meals and met their neighbors, and sunned in the good weather and took shelter in the bad. Many of them had been brought to the ledge the first day they could fly and they accepted Ken and me and the three dogs, moving around on the other side of the glass or on the patio below, as part of their daily routine. I have previously described the tameness of the jays. As for the doves and pigeons, they had become so unafraid that it took several smart taps of a folded newspaper on the window or the porch railing to chase them away when I wanted to turn on the rainbirds. Even then an occasional juvenile would refuse to budge, and would stand glaring at me through the bogus rain with an expression that clearly meant, who did I think I was — the owner of the ledge?

If any of the missing birds had come back I would have recognized them instantly, not as individuals but as former freeloaders who knew their way around the premises. Newcomers arriving at the feeding station were easy to spot.

A very small minority of these were stragglers too hungry, too exhausted or too sick to act in their normally cautious manner. The rose-breasted grosbeak which appeared on October 30, 1963, was a good example. This grosbeak, a bird belonging east of the Rockies, must have been somewhat flabbergasted to find himself not only west of the Rockies, but west of the Sierra Nevada as well; in fact, right at the Pacific coast on our ledge. He ate almost continuously the first day, oblivious to the other birds and to the movements of people on the other side of the window, including a flock of birdwatchers who’d responded to the Rare Bird Alert I had put out as soon as the grosbeak arrived. On the second day he was considerably more skittish and his appearances on the ledge were so sporadic that one determined out-of-town birder had to wait two hours for a glimpse of him. By the fourth day, rested, well fed and in good health again, he was completely wild and independent, and that afternoon he was on his way.

The rose-breasted grosbeak had reversed the usual behavior pattern. Normally a new bird arrives shy and wild and gradually becomes tamer. The first Brewer blackbird, for instance, approached the feeding station quietly and by himself. From an unobtrusive perch in the loquat tree he studied the proceedings for more than a week before he flew down with the other birds, at first on the lower terrace, eventually on the ledge.

The most extreme case of wariness was the crow. He spent an entire winter watching the place from the tops of the eucalyptus trees and the Monterey pines. The opening of a door or window, the turning on of a sprinkler, the slightest movement that was unexpected would send him flying off, squawking invectives at us and warnings to his friends. Only when there were babies to be fed did he come down for food. He was so quick and quiet about it that I didn’t even suspect he was responsible for the whole doughnuts disappearing as soon as I put them out in the wooden dish outside my office window. Though I had no evidence against the scrub jays, I blamed them, on general principles. Then one morning when I went into my office to begin work, a black flash crossed the corner of my vision and the thief was identified. I duly apologized to the jays, who are blamed by nearly everybody for nearly everything.

The crow and the rose-breasted grosbeak provided good examples of the two types of behavior which made newcomers to the feeding station easily recognizable.

The first band-tailed pigeon to arrive after the fire showed no signs of familiarity with the place. He perched, just as our initial bandtail had done years previously, on a eucalyptus limb over the drip birdbath. When I went over to the window and raised my binoculars he flew away. Shadows on windows couldn’t be trusted and binoculars were weapons that might be used against him. He was a stranger. So, too, was the first scrub jay after the fire, and the first mourning dove. No white-winged dove, turtle dove or house wren appeared again at the feeding station.

What had happened? We can never be completely sure, but there seems little doubt that the missing birds were destroyed while they were asleep. Once birds are settled for the night they are hard to disturb. Eyes closed, heartbeat slowed, head tucked under wing and claws locked in position, the sleeping bird is practically oblivious to noise, light and movement: airplanes, sirens, searchlights, high winds, cloudbursts, auto horns, band concerts — and fire. The odor of smoke, a cogent warning of danger to so many furred creatures, is lost on the feathered ones. Sense of smell is poorly developed in birds since there is little need for it in their atmospheric environment.

The band-tailed pigeons, I had learned, used an old Monterey cypress at the head of the canyon as their favorite roost. It seems likely that when the sun set the first evening of the fire, some of the doves and pigeons were roosting in the same cypress, or in the oaks and pines nearby. At nine o’clock the santana began, and in the course of the night the entire area was overrun by flames. The oak leaves burned like paper, the cypress and pine needles like oil-soaked toothpicks.

There were no reports of scorched doves or pigeons, or of smoke-blackened jays. I would like to believe that the birds were lost only to us, that they fled the fire in safety and found food and water and shelter in someone else’s yard. Perhaps they did.

It is difficult to tell what events were the direct result of the fire and what might have happened anyway. In the case of the house wrens, for instance, many of these birds desert the inhabited areas in early fall and spend the next six months in the brush-covered hills preferred by the Bewick wrens and wrentits. Their disappearance on the day the fire started, September 22, may simply have been a coincidence. Perhaps the palm warbler which came on September 25 would have come, fire or no fire; it provided us, however, with the first record of this species in Santa Barbara.

Members of the Audubon Society were asked to be on the lookout for unusual birds, and for noticeable increases or decreases in the number of the ordinary birds. Those who expected disastrous changes were pleasantly surprised by the normal pattern of the migrations:

The white-crowned sparrows arrived for the winter on schedule, on September 24, while the fire was still raging.

The Audubon warblers appeared the next day.

On the 28th, the hooded orioles left for Mexico, the Nashville warblers passed through on their way south and the last of the yellow warblers of the season were observed. On that day, too, the Oregon junco returned.

On October 3, our pair of Lincoln sparrows came back at the same time as the first dozen golden-crowned sparrows, always a week or two later than the white-crowns.

On October 8, the yellow-breasted chat concluded his yearly late-summer stay with us. I don’t know where he went but I’m willing to wager it was a banana-growing region. He was the only wild bird at the feeding station who always showed a distinct preference for bananas.

October 24 marked the return of two myrtle warblers a month later, as usual, than their look-alike cousins, the Audubons.

On November 17, a slaty fox sparrow arrived, followed three days later by one of the rusty subspecies. This was exactly on schedule as far as the feeding station was concerned. Fox sparrows are reported to reach southern California in mid-September and have been seen in Santa Barbara as early as September the 1st, but my records show only one arrival even close to that, on September 28, in 1961; the others have all been in November.

November also brought a burrowing owl, the first of this species to visit us, and he was duly recorded as home visitor No. 106. It’s possible that his appearance was indirectly caused by the fire since this species is not normally seen in canyon areas like ours. However, these birds aren’t always predictable. According to a report in Audubon Field Notes (Volume 19, No. 1), a burrowing owl had, during the previous month, come aboard a ship about sixty miles south of San Clemente Island.

What, then, were some actual results of the fire and what birds were affected?

As might be expected the birds suffering most heavily were terrestrial species poorly equipped to escape by flight. The number of quail found on the Christmas count three months after the fire was 170, compared to 604 found the previous year, and the number of California thrashers was 19, compared to 41. Fringe areas of the fire, such as certain sections of the Botanic Garden, demonstrated an apparent increase in wrentits. These retiring little birds were not only more numerous, they acted bolder than normal and were consequently easy to observe. The overall picture turned out different, however. The 85 wrentits reported on the Christmas count showed a 50-percent decrease from the previous year. It seems more than likely that these three species, quail, thrashers and wrentits, suffered considerable losses in the fire.

Another ground dweller, the Oregon junco, showed an apparent increase because many flocks took to foraging in the burned-over areas and were easy to see in the absence of vegetative cover. Almost a thousand were reported on the Christmas count, double the previous year’s 474. The following year, when the ground vegetation was just about back to normal after a vast reseeding program, the number of juncos also returned to normal, 430; but wrentits remained at a low 84, thrashers at 24, and quail at 330.

Our most personal loss could not be attributed directly to the fire, yet I think it played a part. Johnny, our Scottish terrier, was thirteen at the time and his two wild nights as a refugee did nothing to lighten the load of his years. Up until then he’d been in good health, though his muzzle was long since grey and it had become increasingly apparent that either he was getting lower or the ground was getting higher.

His deterioration after the fire was very rapid. He began losing his hearing and his teeth, and an infection in his nose and eyes proved resistant both to all kinds of antibiotics and to cortisone. He also developed a heart condition which required a digitalis pill twice a day.

The usual technique of administering pills to animals involved a kind of force-feeding most unsuitable to a dog of Johnny’s advanced years and enormous dignity, as well as tender jaws. We therefore spent a considerable percentage of our time devising ways and means of concealing the pills in food. They were served buried in hamburger, wrapped in bacon or bologna, smothered in cottage cheese and scrambled eggs, hidden in chunks of cheddar, inserted in cunningly slit pockets in steak or wedged into frankfurters or liver sausage. After the cheese, steak, liver sausage, etcetera was consumed, we’d often find the digitalis pill on the floor. When this happened I thought of Bushman, the massive gorilla who was the star of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago in the days before tranquilizers and tranquilizer guns eased the difficulties of medical attention for larger animals. Bushman died of pneumonia because he couldn’t be fooled into swallowing the drugs hidden in his food.

By December, Johnny, blind, arthritic and deaf, had become almost completely dependent. It was a strange fate for this sturdy, self-reliant little creature, this most unlapdog of dogs. He had to be lifted in and out of the red leather chair where he slept, and carried up and down stairs. He could be let out alone in the fenced yard where he knew every plant and weed and blade of grass. Elsewhere, in the field next door, on the path down to the creek, or up the road to the neighboring houses, I went with him, keeping a tactful distance behind so as not to disturb his Scottish pride.

On a foggy evening shortly before Christmas a delivery boy left the fence gate open and Johnny disappeared. We roused the people next door and there began a frantic search by flashlight for a small black dog in a large black night. Eventually he was found on the other side of the circle, sitting calm and composed in a yard once occupied by his girlfriend, also a Scottie, named Annie Laurie. She had long since left the neighborhood, and perhaps life itself; but Johnny was dreaming of happier times, bright days, fast runs, fair ladies.

One morning in mid-February he began hemorrhaging, and at noon he was put to sleep.

The Coyote fire had taken a heavy toll. But for some people who lived far from the fire’s perimeter and never gave a thought to its effect on them, the worst was yet to come.