California Had Just 27 Condors Left on Earth — What Happened After the Release Doesn't Look Real.

In the spring of 2019, a park biologist at Zion National Park in southern Utah aimed a spotting scope at a sandstone cliff face just north of Angels Landing. Tucked inside a narrow crevice, barely visible against the red rock, was a pale shape. A condor chick. It was not remarkable because it existed. It was remarkable because of the number stamped on its studbook record. The 1,000th California condor chick to hatch since a breeding program began, with just 27 birds on the entire planet. That number is not a typo. 27. The largest flying land bird in North America, a creature with a nine and a half foot wingspan that once soared from the Pacific coast to Florida, had been reduced to a population smaller than a high school classroom. This is the story of how a handful of scientists, zookeepers, indigenous leaders, and one controversial decision to make an entire species extinct in the wild on purpose brought the California condor back from the edge of oblivion. And why the fight to keep it alive is far from over. To understand why this matters, you need to know what was lost. The California condor is an ancient animal. Fossil records place it across North America during the Pleistocene, soaring alongside mammoths, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats over 10,000 years ago. It fed on the carcasses of megafauna, riding thermal currents at altitudes of up to 15,000 feet, scanning vast landscapes for the dead. Its wingspan stretches roughly nine and a half feet. That is wider than most automobiles. It can weigh up to 25 pounds, making it the heaviest flying land bird on the continent. It is not a graceful flyer in the way a hawk is. It is a massive, deliberate glider, built for endurance rather than speed. A single condor can cover more than 150 miles in a day without flapping its wings more than a few times, riding invisible columns of rising warm air called thermals, with an efficiency that no human aircraft has ever matched at that scale. When the megafauna disappeared at the end of the last ice age, condors adapted. They scavenged marine mammals along the Pacific coast, whales, sea lions, elephant seals. They fed on deer and elk carcasses in the inland valleys and foothills. They were part of a system that cleaned the landscape of decay, preventing the spread of disease, and cycling nutrients back into the soil. Lewis and Clark saw condors at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805. The birds' range once stretched from British Columbia to Baja California, and fossil evidence suggests they ranged as far east as New York and Florida during the Pleistocene. That system functioned for thousands of years. The condor was its caretaker, then Europeans arrived and the collapse began. By the mid-1800s, condors were being shot on sight. Ranchers believed they killed livestock – calves, lambs, newborn cattle. They did not. Condors are obligate scavengers. They eat only what is already dead. Their feet are not built for grasping. Their beaks are designed for tearing flesh from bone, not for killing. But the myth persisted, passed from rancher to rancher across generations. Egg collectors raided nests, climbing into cliff caves to steal the single large white egg a condor pair would produce. Each stolen egg erased a year of reproductive potential. Settlers poisoned carcasses with strychnine, intended for grizzly bears and wolves, and condors died alongside them. The pesticide DDT thinned their eggshells until they cracked under the weight of an incubating parent. Habitat disappeared under sprawl and agriculture. By 1924, condors had vanished from Arizona entirely. By the 1940s, an estimated 150 remained, all squeezed into the mountains of Southern California. By 1967, the species was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Preservation Act, the predecessor to the Endangered Species Act. The population kept falling – 60 birds, then fewer. By 1982, only 22 California condors existed anywhere on the planet. 22 individuals carrying the genetic legacy of a lineage stretching back millions of years. A species that once darkened skies across an entire continent had been compressed into a number that could fit on two hands, twice over. The sky was emptying. And then came lead. Lead ammunition, specifically. Here is the key insight that changed everything. When a hunter shoots a deer or a wild pig with a lead bullet, the bullet does not stay intact. It fragments on impact into hundreds of tiny pieces, some as small as grains of sand, embedded in the tissue far from the wound channel. The hunter takes the meat. The gut pile stays behind. A condor finds it. It feeds. And it ingests lead fragments, so small they are invisible to the naked eye. Lead poisoning is not quick. It attacks the nervous system. It causes lethargy, loss of coordination, seizures, paralysis, organ failure, and death. A single contaminated meal can kill a condor. Researchers later determined that lead poisoning was the primary driver of condor mortality in the 20th century and remains the leading cause of death today. Not habitat loss. Not poaching. Not power line collisions. Lead. Nobody connected it to the ammunition at first. By the time they did, the species was nearly gone. Here is the turning point, and it came wrapped in the most bitter kind of controversy. In 1979, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established the California Condor Recovery Program. The initial strategy was cautious. Study the remaining birds. Protect their habitat. Begin captive breeding alongside a wild population. But the population kept cratering. In 1982, only 22 birds remained. By 1984, seven condors died in rapid succession, including birds that had been fitted with radio transmitters, their signals going silent one after another across the rugged mountains of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Noel Snyder, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who had been studying condors since the early days of the recovery program, became convinced that every remaining wild bird needed to be captured and brought into captivity. All of them. It was the only way to control the variables, protect them from lead, and breed enough birds to have a chance. The idea was radical, in a way that is hard to overstate. It meant deliberately making the California condor extinct in the wild. It meant trusting that zoo breeding programs could replace what millions of years of evolution had built. The National Audubon Society fought it fiercely. They won a legal injunction in 1986 to block the capture of the last three wild condors, arguing that removing every bird from the wild was an admission of defeat, that a condor in a cage was no longer a condor, that the species would lose its essential wildness forever and become a zoo curiosity. The debate cut to the core of what conservation even means. Is a species truly saved if it only exists behind wire? Would birds raised in artificial enclosures retain the knowledge their ancestors had accumulated across millennia? The injunction was lifted on appeal. Trapping resumed. And on Easter Sunday, April 19th, 1987, a biologist crouched in a camouflaged pit near a carcass in the mountains of Southern California and captured a young male condor, designated AC9, Adult Condor 9. He was the last free-flying California condor on Earth. He joined 26 others, a mix of wild-caught and zoo-hatched birds held at the Los Angeles Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Jan Hamber, the condor biologist who helped capture AC9 that morning, later described the moment. She said that to her, it was like the whole sky was empty. The species was now extinct in the wild. Not endangered. Not threatened. Extinct in the wild. The gamble was total. If captive breeding failed, the California condor would join the dodo and the passenger pigeon. The challenge was enormous, and it started with biology working against them. Condors do not reproduce quickly. They reach sexual maturity at about six years of age. They form long-term monogamous pair bonds that can last decades. A female lays a single egg per breeding attempt, and the pair typically breeds only once every one to two years. The egg takes about 56 days to incubate. The chick does not fledge for five to six months. At that rate, rebuilding a population from 27 birds would take generations. But the breeding teams at San Diego and Los Angeles had a technique learned partly from earlier work with the closely related Andean condor. It was called double clutching. If a condor egg is removed early in the incubation period, the female will lay a replacement. If that egg is also removed, she may lay a third. The first two eggs go into artificial incubators, maintained at precise temperature and humidity levels. The parents raise the third naturally. This effectively triples the reproductive output of each breeding pair. In 1983, even before the final captures, a chick named Sisquac became the first California condor hatched in captivity at the San Diego Zoo. In 1988, the first fully captive breeding success occurred. A chick named Moloco hatched in San Diego. The population had started to grow. The next problem was stranger and more delicate. Condor chicks raised by human hands would imprint on humans. They would associate people with food and safety. Released into the wild, they would approach hikers, explore garbage dumps, land on rooftops. They would not survive. Bill Toon, a biologist at the San Diego Zoo, needed a solution. He approached two sisters who ran a puppet theater near the zoo and asked them to build something no one had ever built before. A hand puppet shaped like an adult condor head, painted with realistic detail, complete with red eyes and the wrinkled pinkish skin of an adult condor. When a chick hatched, zookeepers fed it using the puppet. They never let the chick see a human face. Every feeding, every interaction, every moment of contact was mediated through this leather and paint condor head, mimicking the movements and postures of a real condor parent. The chicks nibbled and nuzzled the puppet. They begged it for food. They learned condor behaviors from what they believed was their mother. It was meticulous, exhausting work. Keepers worked around-the-clock shifts for months at a time. Senior condor keeper Ron Webb at the San Diego Safari Park later described the process. He said the puppet is like a fancy glove that covers their hands so the chick does not get any beneficial experiences from people. They want it to be a nice wild animal, not relying on people for food. As chicks grew, they were moved to remote socialization pens where they lived with older mentor condors. These mentors, experienced adults who would never be released themselves, taught the juveniles the complex social behaviors that define condor life. Dominance displays, communal roosting, the subtle body language of a species whose social hierarchy is as layered as any primate group. Before release, captive condors were also given aversion training. They were exposed to simulated power lines rigged with mild electric shocks. Condors that learned to avoid the lines survived dramatically longer in the wild. Those that did not were at constant risk of electrocution or collision. The entire process, from hatching to release, took years for each bird. On January 14, 1992, two captive-bred California condors stepped out of transport crates at the Sespe Condor Sanctuary in Los Padres National Forest and flew into the California wind. It was the first time the species had been free in nearly five years. The total condor population, wild and captive combined, had risen from 27 to 64. Nobody knew if they would survive a week. The early results were modest and uncertain, and at times discouraging. Several released birds died quickly. Power line collisions. Lead poisoning from contaminated carcasses they found in the backcountry. Some puppet-reared condors displayed unsettling behavioral quirks. Researcher Amy Utt of Loma Linda University found that puppet-reared birds showed an unhealthy curiosity about humans and were less social with other condors. One bird was observed perching on rocks above rock climbers, watching them with obvious fascination. Others explored garbage dumps and approached people with excessive boldness. The puppet technique had prevented full imprinting, but it had not perfectly replicated the social education a wild-raised condor receives from its parents and flock across months of intimate contact. The program adapted. Parent-reared birds, raised by actual condor pairs in captivity, showed better social adjustment and stronger wild survival rates. The program shifted toward parent-rearing whenever possible, reserving puppet-rearing for cases where breeding pairs could not raise their own young. But the numbers kept climbing. By 1996, the population reached 103, with 13 birds flying free. That same year, releases began near the Vermilion Cliffs in Arizona, establishing a second wild population hundreds of miles from the California birds. In 1997, the Ventana Wildlife Society began releasing condors along the Big Sur coast, where the birds were documented feeding on a gray whale carcass for the first time in over 200 years. In 2003, condors were released in Baja California, Mexico, and at Pinnacles National Monument in Central California. The map of condor territory was expanding for the first time in over a century. Scientists expected a long, slow recovery, a species clawing its way back over decades. The models said the population might reach self-sustaining levels by mid-century if everything went right. What happened next broke the models. In 2002, the first wild-born condor chick successfully fledged in Ventura County, California, not a captive chick released into the wild. A condor born free, raised free, learning to fly in the same thermals its ancestors had ridden for millennia. That same year, AC-9, the last wild condor captured on Easter Sunday in 1987, was released back into the wild after 15 years in captivity. He was given a new wing tag, Condor 21. Jan Hamber, the same biologist who had helped capture him, was there to watch. He needed only a few minutes to get his bearings before flying out over the canyon. Joseph Brandt, a lead condor biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, watched the release. He said the bird kind of flew right past them, that it was really incredible. In 2003, the first wild-hatched chick fledged in Arizona near the Grand Canyon. In 2004, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed the first successful chick hatched and raised entirely in the wild in California. That milestone was something the models had not predicted happening so quickly. These were not captive birds stumbling through an unfamiliar landscape. These were wild-born condors, raised by parents who had themselves been raised by puppets and mentors, now passing on a version of wildness that had been painstakingly reassembled from fragments. The system was rebuilding itself, not the way engineers rebuild things, the way nature rebuilds things, slowly, then suddenly. By 2008, for the first time in over 20 years, more California condors were flying free than were held in captivity. Let me put that in context. 21 years earlier, the entire species had been deliberately captured, made extinct in the wild. Every critic who said the birds would never fly free again had been proven wrong. In 2010, the first condor chick hatched at Pinnacles National Monument, the first there in over 100 years. Biologist Daniel George of the National Park Service confirmed the chick's parents, condors 317 and 318, were exhibiting normal parenting behavior. Therese Burnett, a condor biologist at the Ventana Wildlife Society, said it was really great to see a condor they had invested so much time and effort in, now breeding in the wild. In 2019, the 1,000th condor chick hatched at Zion National Park, a wild-born chick nesting on the cliffs, just north of Angels Landing. Russ Norvell of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources called it a monumental milestone in the condor recovery program. Tim Hock, condor program manager at the Peregrine Fund, described the trend plainly. He said they are seeing more chicks born in the wild than they ever have before, and that it is just a step towards success for the condor and achieving a sustainable population. Then came a moment that carried a different kind of weight entirely. On May 3, 2022, the Yurok tribe in northern California released the first pair of California condors into Redwood National and State Parks. It was the first time the species had flown over those forests since 1892. Over 130 years of absence ended in a single morning. The Yurok word for condor is praegoniche, and it is not simply a name. In Yurok tradition, the condor is a sacred spirit who helped establish the world renewal ceremonies that define the tribe's relationship with the land. The loss of praegoniche was not just ecological, it was spiritual. Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Wildlife Department, had spent over a decade working to make the reintroduction happen, conducting feasibility analyses and building the Northern California Condor Restoration Program from scratch. She gave each condor a Yurok name. The first bird released was called Negem Nechwinkar, She Carries Our Prayers. By September 2025, 22, condors were flying free on Yurok Ancestral Territory. Williams-Claussen said she had been waiting for this moment since the first condors arrived in 2022. As of December 31st, 2025, the total world population of California condors stood at 607. 392 flying free in the wild across California, Arizona, Utah, Baja California and Northern California. 215 in captivity across four breeding facilities, from 27 to 607. That is not a rounding error. That is a species refusing to disappear. Here is a comparison that almost nobody makes. The Condor Recovery Program has cost an estimated $35 to $60 million over four decades. That sounds like a lot until you consider what condors do for free. They are the cleanup crew of the ecosystem. They locate and consume dead animals that would otherwise rot, spread disease and attract pests. A single condor can strip a carcass in hours. There is no artificial substitute for a scavenger that can cover 150 miles a day scanning for the dead. No drone, no satellite network, no sanitation crew replaces what a condor does by instinct. This is not romantic nature worship. This is hard-nosed ecology. But here is the honest tension. The California condor is still not safe and the reasons are complicated enough that no single solution will fix them. Lead poisoning remains the leading cause of death in free-flying condors. In the Central California flock, lead poisoning accounts for 62% of confirmed deaths. In the Southern flock, 44%. From 1992 to 2025, there were 161 confirmed deaths from lead poisoning in the wild free-flying population. California banned lead ammunition statewide in 2019 and the ban has been effective in reducing lead levels near release sites. But a study published in March 26 by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, revealed a painful irony. The ban is working. But the condors are undermining it by succeeding. As the population grows and birds become more independent, they are foraging farther from release sites, venturing into areas where lead bullet bans and education campaigns have less reach. They are eating fewer of the clean, lead-free carcasses provided by conservation workers. They are behaving more like genuinely wild birds, and that wildness is killing them. For hunters and ranchers, the situation creates real economic pressure that deserves to be heard. Non-lead ammunition for the .22 Long Rifle, the most common firearm used for pest control on California ranches, is nearly impossible to find in most stores. Ranchers who shoot hundreds of rounds of rimfire ammunition every weekend to control ground squirrels face alternatives that cost five times as much when they can be found at all. The Congressional Sportsman's Foundation, backed by a coalition of 23 hunting organizations, opposed the original ban in 2013, calling it an unnecessary effort to chip away at hunters' rights. Kelly Sorensen, executive director of the Ventana Wildlife Society, has spent years trying to bridge the divide, running a program to distribute free non-lead ammunition to hunters and ranchers. He acknowledged the difficulty bluntly. He said the people who are really having a hard time switching over are the ranchers. The economics are real, the frustration is legitimate, and dismissing it does not help the condors. Then there is microtrash, a threat so absurd it would be funny if it were not lethal. Adult condors pick up small shiny objects from the ground, bottle caps, broken glass, spent bullet casings, can tabs, bits of wire. They bring these items back to their cliff nests and feed them to their chicks, most likely mistaking them for the bone fragments and mollusc shell chips that provide calcium to growing nestlings. The chicks cannot digest metal and glass. The debris accumulates in their gastrointestinal tracts, causing impaction, internal bleeding, starvation, and death. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, more than 40% of known deaths in wild condor nestlings in California have been attributed to microtrash ingestion. In nestlings under six months old, the figure is 73%. Biologists now rappel into cliff nests to clear trash before chicks hatch, and periodically throughout the nesting season. Volunteers with the Ventana Wildlife Society collect an estimated 15 pounds of microtrash annually from highway pullouts along the Big Sur coast, debris left behind by tourists who have no idea a condor chick might die because of a bottle cap they dropped. It helps, but it is a band-aid on a wound that will not close as long as humans leave garbage anywhere near condor habitat. And in the spring of 2023, a new threat arrived with terrifying speed. Highly pathogenic avian influenza, known as HPAI or bird flu, swept through the Arizona-Utah condor flock near the Grand Canyon and Vermilion Cliffs. Within a single month, 21 condors died. For a species with only about 600 birds in the world, losing 21 in one outbreak is not a setback. It is a catastrophe. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has since approved a vaccine for use in California condors, and trials on captive birds and related species have shown promise. But the episode was a brutal reminder that this species remains one disaster away from crisis. A single disease outbreak, a single wildfire at the wrong breeding facility, a single contaminated carcass found by a group of feeding condors could erase years of work in days. The free-flying condor population is still not self-sustaining. That is the truth that sits beneath every celebration. Without continued captive breeding and regular release of new birds into the wild population, the condor would decline. A 2025 study by researchers Bruce Marcotte, Nathan Shoemaker and Jesse D'Elia modeled the future. If reintroduction stopped and lead levels stayed the same, the population could decline by 81%. But if lead were eliminated from condor food sources and reintroductions continued, the population could increase by 569%. The path forward is clear. The obstacles are political, economic, and stubbornly human. Now remember that cliff face at Zion. The red sandstone crevice, north of Angel's Landing. The pale shape, barely visible through a spotting scope. Chick number 1,000. That bird fledged on September 25, 2019, taking its first flight from the same nest cave where it had hatched five months earlier. It became the first wild-hatched condor chick to successfully fledge within Zion National Park since recovery efforts began, and likely the first in over 100 years. Its mother, Condor 409, had lost her first mate, Condor 337, to lead poisoning in 2016. She found a new partner, she laid a new egg, and she raised the bird that carried the number that marked how far this species had come. 607 birds where there were once 27. Wild-born chicks in Utah, California, Arizona, Baja, California, and Mexico. Condors soaring over ancient redwood forests for the first time in over a century, given Yurok names, and carrying the prayers of a people who never stopped believing they would return. Puppet mothers made of leather and paint-raising chicks that would one day raise their own young on wild cliff faces. The models said it could not happen this fast. The data refused to fit the models. It still does not. But the Condor is not saved. It is stabilised. It is held in place by the hands of hundreds of biologists, veterinarians, keepers, tribal leaders, and volunteers who trap birds twice a year for lead blood tests, clear trash from cliff nests, distribute non-lead ammunition to sceptical ranchers, vaccinate fledglings against avian flu, and sit awake through the night candling eggs under warm lights. The California Condor flies because people will not stop carrying it. The question is whether we can build a world where it no longer needs to be carried at all. What surprised you most about this story? Was it the puppet mothers? The lead ammunition? The Yurok names? The sheer improbability of the comeback? I want to hear what landed for you. Drop it in the comments. And if you are not subscribed yet, now is the time. We cover stories about restoration and the people who are fixing what is broken. Hit subscribe. See you in the next one.