When they can elude the family of Steller's Jays who serve as self-appointed guardians of the birdseed strewn across the railing, acorn woodpeckers, grosbeaks, mountain chickadees, Oregon juncos and other winged characters from Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds drop by to feed.

Bird-watching, like fishing, affords a succor of serenity even at its least eventful. But every once in a great while, it can quicken the pulse.

This area (which abuts the Los Padres National Forest) hosts twenty or so California condors, reintroduced into the area following an ambitious preservation project that rescued them from extinction. These hulking, pink-headed vultures, with their stole of charcoal-hued neck-feathers, have achieved near-legendary status among us mountain-dwellers, whether year-round or weekend.

Julia and I even drove up to the street that seemed to be where a gaggle of condors had been photographed (as glimpsed in a beautiful print mounted outside a real-estate office), but to no avail. A day's wandering reminded us what a wild goose chase is really about.

Then, on the first afternoon of a three-day weekend, Julia sat on the deck, gazing heavenward, when she saw two massive pairs of wings shearing an updraft. A moment later, two condors alighted on the gnarled, uppermost branches of a dead tree that towers (some fifty yards to the north) over the green belt and reaches upward as devoutly, in its gothic way, as any of the living Piñon Pines or Douglas Firs that surround it.

We watched them for a long time, rapt. A smudged, photocopied article - rummaged for in the drawer of pamphlets, in which it had resided since 1983 - described their scavenger's diet of carrion, the solitary egg that results from each mating, the way condor chicks in captivity were fed by a hand-puppet resembling a mama condor's head.

The piece also mentioned that Indians of the region worshipped the condors as Thunderbirds - understandably suspecting that the low whoop of their sublime wings shook the heavens - and associated them with immortality.

Reading on, we learned that conservation workers had tagged the massive beasts with numbers and that some wore radio transmitters. But the article was so old that we didn't know how many birds had survived the conservation and re-habitation efforts.

They rested and preened, periodically adjusting their wings or turning to sun a different part of their considerable surface area in what almost resembled a series of yoga positions. A flash of under-wing revealed their tag numbers, 8 and 0.

I padded inside and did a quick Net search. Among the half-dozen or so hits for "California condor" was a link to a story on the L.A. Zoo site chronicling the release of one condor into the wild. The last female to have been captured in the wild for the program, she had been harbored in 1986, added nine fledglings to her breed's population, served as a sort of mentor for immature condors and, in April, was unleashed in Ventura County, just north of our house.

Her number: 8.

I ran outside and told Julia that the story of the bird in our tree was on the Internet. Meanwhile AC-8 (for "Adult Condor") rested her mottled rose beak in her wing as AC-0 hunkered down on an adjoining branch.

The experience was revelatory for a number of reasons. It was a profound illustration of the power of the Net to enhance experience with information. It also occurred to me that this creature was part of the electronic universe I travel, yet we both now inhabited the same point in space. What's more, AC-8's radio transmitter, like my laptop, was a filament connecting her to a network of both assistance and surveillance.

Yet here we both were, sharing a spectacular day in late spring, surveying the multitude of tiny dramas playing out in the branches, on the breeze, in the brush below.

At last, as the sunlight began to recede from the valley, numbers 8 and 0 undertook a sequence of wing-readying meditations before launching into the purpling sky. We passed the binoculars back and forth until they were gone from view.

They looked like Thunderbirds.

--Simon Glickman