Los Padres National Forest: The California Condor, Extinction in the Wild and the Long Return

On April nineteenth, nineteen eighty-seven, a biologist named Jan Hamber captured the last wild California condor. She was working for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The bird was the final free-flying condor on earth: every other member of the species was already in captivity in the San Diego Zoo and the Los Angeles Zoo. Risser put the bird in a crate, drove it to San Diego, and closed the cage door. The largest flying bird in North America, a species that had soared over the Los Angeles Basin for ten thousand years, was gone from the sky.

The population had collapsed over decades. Lead poisoning from ammunition in carcasses, collisions with power lines, illegal shooting, habitat loss, and the birds' own reproductive biology, which produces only one egg every two years, had combined to reduce a population that had once ranged from Baja California to British Columbia to twenty-seven individuals by nineteen eighty-seven. The US Fish and Wildlife Service and the zoos made the decision to capture the last wild birds and attempt to rebuild the population entirely in captivity before attempting reintroduction.

The first captive-bred condors were released into the wild in January of nineteen ninety-two, five years after the last wild bird was taken, in the southern end of Los Padres National Forest. Releases in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur did not begin until nineteen ninety-seven. The reintroduction was tentative and the mortality high in the early years. The birds flew into power lines and died of lead poisoning from carcasses again, the same causes that had nearly ended the species in the first place.

By the twenty-twenties, the wild condor population had climbed back above three hundred birds, with additional populations in Arizona, Utah, and Baja California. The Ventana Wilderness population roosts in the Big Sur and Los Padres forests and soars over the same ridgelines where condors had flown for millennia before the population collapsed. A bird with a wingspan of nine and a half feet is hard to miss once you know to look for it.

The bird did not recover. It was brought back. There is a difference.