The California Condor Returns to the Vermilion Cliffs

To the east and south of Kanab, the Vermilion Cliffs rise in a wall of deep-red Wingate sandstone that stretches for hundreds of miles along the Utah-Arizona border. The cliffs are dramatic enough on their own, but what makes this stretch of canyon country particularly significant is what flies above it.

The California condor, the largest land bird in North America with a wingspan approaching ten feet, was functionally extinct by the nineteen eighties. A captive breeding program rescued the species from the very edge: by nineteen eighty-seven, only twenty-seven birds remained alive in the world, and wildlife managers decided to capture all of them for an emergency breeding effort. The recovery was agonizingly slow.

In nineteen ninety-six, the first condors from the breeding program were released at the Vermilion Cliffs. The location was chosen because the terrain offered the cliff faces condors need for roosting and nesting, the thermals they need for effortless soaring over wide distances, and enough distance from dense human populations to give the young birds room to learn. Today several hundred condors live in the wild across the Southwest, and the population centered on the Vermilion Cliffs and the Grand Canyon represents one of the most successful wildlife recovery programs in American history.

From the right vantage point east of Kanab on a clear day, you can sometimes see them riding the updrafts above the cliffs, those enormous red-tagged wings stretched wide. Each bird wears a tag with a number that wildlife biologists read from a distance to track its progress. They are the most observed wild birds in the country, and also the most improbable: animals that should not exist, brought back from nothing.