California Condors at the Zoo
I met three condors at the Santa Barbara Zoo last month.
If you’ve been reading here, you may have noticed I’m obsessed with California condors. I hope to see one in the wild someday. Arrangements are being made.
But I did have the opportunity to see three California condors in real life at the Santa Barbara Zoo last month, when my daughter Melissa, my three-year-old granddaughter Louise, and I took a little vacation trip to “the American Riviera.”
The reason I’m so obsessed with these birds is that I’m old enough to remember when they became extinct in the wild in 1987. I have watched over the past 37 years as conservationists brought them back from the brink of extinction and gradually began returning them to the wild. If you want to learn more about their history and some of the things that make these birds so amazing, you can read their story, which I braided into my short story “The Big South.”
But the short version is this: in 1967, the California condor was the first species to be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. By 1987, there were only 22 California condors left in the wild and 26 in captivity. On Easter Sunday 1987, when Melissa was Lou’s age, the last wild birds were captured in order to prevent their extinction. Conservationists began releasing them back into the wild in the early 1990s, and there are ongoing efforts to recover their numbers and to eliminate or mitigate the human factors that led to their near-extinction in the first place.
The Santa Barbara Zoo is part of the California Condor Recovery Program. As such, it’s one of a handful of zoos that have California condors in residency. The zoo’s conservationists do a lot of things to help recover the numbers of this endangered species. One of my favorite things they do is provide a place for young condors to learn the life skills they will need to survive, before they are released into the wild. It’s a gradual process, and if you’re a nerd like me, you can sign up for the Ventana Wildlife Society newsletter, watch the birds live on condor cams, attend monthly condor chats, and livestream the next release of birds into the wild. Locally, the birds are usually released a time or two a year in the San Simeon/Big Sur area.
It was incredible to see these birds up close and in person but also a little sad to see them surrounded by wire fences on all sides and overhead. There really isn’t much room for soaring through the sky. But we can take comfort in knowing that they are being kept safe and that there is a strategy in place to return these magnificent birds to their rightful homes. And when they are, they’ll be given real names in addition to their numbered tags.
While the California condor is still an endangered species, their numbers have increased from 48 in 1987 to 560 in 2024. Of those, 343 are now living in the wild. As you can tell, it has been a long and slow recovery process.
To learn more about and support California condor recovery efforts, visit the Ventana Wildlife Society website. They have tons of resources, and you can make a donation and even adopt a condor.
P.S. One of the funniest things I saw at the zoo was in the next area over—the Santa Barbara Zoo is home to two bald eagles, Avalon and new arrival Amelia Earhart. One of them was perched way up in the treetops, just inches from the overhead netting, when a squirrel ran across the netting and stopped for a break just above the eagle, calm as could be. The squirrel was apparently aware the eagle couldn’t get to it—otherwise, it would never have gotten so up close and personal!