California Condors Achieve a Happy New Milestone

by Emily Silber, National Audubon Society

Female California Condor with her newly hatched chick. Photo courtesy Joseph Brandt / U.S. FWS.

After more than 35 years of flirting with extinction, the California Condor is finally due for a success story. This week the California Condor Recovery Program announced that 2015 was the first year in decades in which the number of chicks hatched and raised in the wild outweighed the number of wild condor deaths—14 births to 12 deaths: a sign that these pink-faced beauties are on a steady track to recovery.

Condors may be the largest birds in North America, but they were, and still are, scarce. The bird was among the first animals to be protected by the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s—thanks to pressure from Audubon members. But habitat loss, hunting, DDT contamination, and, above all, lead poisoning continued to plague the condor, and ultimately, the species was reduced to a mere 23 individuals by the 1980s.

That’s when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their partners decided they had to step in.

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