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?