14 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY FEBRUARY 19-25, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com To save condors, conservation biologists take on a new role of advocating for easier access to ammo. By Sara Rubin It’s within the 60-plus-year lifespan of a California condor that the entire species was on the brink of extinction. In 1967, the first time the U.S. released a list of endangered species, the birds were critically endangered. By 1982, just 22 of them remained in the wild. Hoping to save North America’s largest flying bird from disappearing entirely, biologists began capturing the wild birds and by 1987, all known California condors were in captivity at zoos. Scientists began breeding them and a decade later, started releasing those young condors into the wild. Another decade after that, condors again started nesting in the wild in Central California. It was the beginning of a remarkable comeback story. Today, there are 117 condors in the wild on the Central Coast. (In three other populations, Arizona, Baja and Northern California’s Yurok tribal area, there are another 247 California condors.) That is a success story that conservation organizations love to tell. But scientists see another milestone within reach—getting the California condor to be self-sustaining in the wild, instead of relying on human intervention of breeding in zoos and then releasing chicks as a continuously conservation-dependent species. “It’s all about overall mortality. You want the population to be sustainable—you want more chicks in the wild to be born than to die,” says Myra Finkelstein, a professor of microbiology and environmental toxicology at UC Santa Cruz. The condor success story so far has relied on the birth part of the equation. The death part is in the works, but solutions are surprisingly attainable. “Just reducing mortality by 1 percent could take the population from declining to slightly growing,” Finkelstein says. Even modest growth could tip the scale for the species from reliant on human intervention to sustaining itself in nature, and being able to withstand catastrophic events like wildfires. (The 2020 Dolan Fire killed 12 condors.) Even more encouraging for advoMAGIC BULLET Condor 550 (unnamed, left) was hatched in the wild in 2010 in Pinnacles National Park and successfully treated at the LA Zoo for lead poisoning. She and Condor 652 (Ferdinand), shown in Big Sur, are now a breeding pair. Ferdinand is the son of Topa Topa, the oldest known living condor, who will turn 60 this year. VENTANA WILDLIFE SOCIETY / MEREDITH EVANS
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