06/02/2026
Not fish. But the concept. Recognition, hard decisions, action.
Species can be saved. With a will, with dedication.
On Easter Sunday, April 19, 1987, a biologist climbed into the mountains above Ventura County, California, set a carcass-baited cannon net, and captured the last California condor flying wild anywhere on earth. When the net fired and the bird went down, the species was extinct in the wild. Twenty-seven birds remained, all of them in cages at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo. For the first time in at least ten thousand years, no California condor was in the sky.
His designation was AC-9. Adult Condor 9. The staff at the San Diego Zoo nicknamed him T**a T**a. He was a young male, estimated at six to eight years old, and he had been watched closely for years before the capture. His movements, his molt patterns, his interactions with other condors, his pairing with an older female in late 1985, and his first breeding attempts in 1986 had all been documented in detail. He was not an anonymous bird pulled from a flock. He was known as an individual. Every condor left in the remnant population was.
The decision to capture every remaining wild condor was one of the most contested calls in the history of American conservation. The National Audubon Society opposed it. They argued that removing all condors from the wild was giving up. That a condor in a cage was no longer a condor. That captive breeding would produce birds that had lost their essential wildness and could never function in the landscape again. Audubon fought the plan in court and in the press. The debate was not about biology alone. It was about what a species is worth if it only exists behind wire.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proceeded anyway. The math was brutal and simple. Nine wild condors remained in 1985, and the number was dropping. Lead poisoning from ingesting fragments of ammunition in the carcasses they scavenged was killing them. Collisions with power lines were killing them. Shooting was killing them. The wild population was not stabilizing. It was collapsing in real time while people argued about whether captivity was worse than extinction. USFWS decided that twenty-seven birds in cages had a future. Zero birds in the wild did not.
AC-9 joined the breeding program and never flew free again. But AC-4, another male captured two years earlier from the same remnant population, became the program's first success. He sired the first chick born in captivity, giving the founders proof that the birds would breed behind wire. Over the next thirty-five years, AC-4 fathered thirty condor chicks that were released into the wild. In December 2015, at age thirty-five, AC-4 himself was released back into the sky at Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in Kern County, the same canyon where he had been captured three decades earlier. He banked into the wind, glided over the rim, and flew out of sight. His first free flight in thirty years.
The breeding program that AC-9's capture completed used techniques that pushed captive wildlife management further than it had ever gone. Double clutching, where biologists removed the first egg from a nest to prompt the female to lay a replacement, effectively doubled the reproductive output of birds that naturally lay one egg every two years. Puppet rearing, where keepers wore condor-head puppets while feeding and handling chicks so the birds never saw a human face, prevented imprinting. The same technique was later adapted for the whooping crane ultralight migration program we covered on this page. The condor program invented it.
In 1992, the first captive-bred California condors were released into the wild at sites in southern and central California. The birds crashed into power lines. They landed on rooftops. They approached humans without fear. The early releases produced mortalities that made critics of the captive program feel vindicated. The birds did not know how to be wild because they had never been wild.
The program adapted. Aversion training was added. Captive condors were exposed to simulated power poles that delivered mild electric shocks, teaching them to avoid lines before release. Mentor birds, older condors with wild experience, were placed with young releases to demonstrate foraging, soaring, and social behavior. Release sites were selected for terrain that offered thermal updrafts and distance from human infrastructure. Each generation of released birds performed better than the last.
As of December 2025, the world population of California condors stands at 607. More than half are flying free in the wild across five release sites: Hopper Mountain and Big Sur in California, Vermillion Cliffs in Arizona, Pinnacles National Park in central California, and Sierra de San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, Mexico. In 2003, the first wild-fledged condor chick since 1981 took flight. The wild population now exceeds the captive population for the first time since the species was pulled from the sky.
Lead poisoning remains the primary killer. California banned lead ammunition for hunting in 2019, but enforcement is incomplete and condors range into Arizona and Utah where lead ammunition is still legal. A condor that feeds on a gut pile left by a hunter using lead bullets ingests fragments that dissolve in its digestive acid and enter the bloodstream. One contaminated meal can kill. The recovery program has spent nearly forty years and hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding a population that lead ammunition continues to dismantle one carcass at a time.
AC-9 never flew wild again after Easter Sunday 1987. He lived the rest of his life in captivity. He contributed to the breeding program. He was the last bird captured, which means he was the bird whose capture made the species extinct in the wild, and his capture is the reason the species exists today. That is the contradiction the Audubon Society was fighting about in 1985, and thirty-eight years later, 607 condors later, the argument has not been settled. It has just been answered with a number large enough to keep flying.
Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance / National Audubon Society / NBC News.
