Hundreds of feet above California’s golden hills, Condor 726 (aka “Little Stinker”) rides a thermal—a column of warm, rising air—lifting her 20-pound, black-and-white-feathered body higher into the sky. Lake Del Valle, a blue jewel, blinks below. Buoyed by air currents following the contours of the mountains, she glides toward Mount Diablo, her naked, pink head held aloft as she scans for food. With each passing second, she flies farther from her flock’s Central California stronghold and ventures closer to the East Bay, a place few California condors have visited in more than a hundred years.
Once teetering on the brink of extinction, today’s California condors are slowly recovering. Their numbers rose to 607 birds by the end of 2025, including nearly 400 living in the wild across Central California, Southern California, Baja, the Pacific Northwest, Utah, and Arizona. Decades of dedicated, collaborative action have given California condors a fighting chance at survival and East Bay residents an opportunity to spot North America’s largest land bird. But it’s been a long road to reach this point—and the journey is far from over.
The early days of condor conservation
In 1982, California condor populations reached their lowest point after enduring decades of habitat loss, lead poisoning, shootings, power-line collisions, and more. Fewer than 30 individuals had survived. An initiative called the California Condor Recovery Program, started by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1979, set out to increase the number of wild condors through captive breeding and releases in order to establish self-sustaining populations. But as the condor population continued to plummet toward extinction, the Fish and Wildlife Service made the controversial decision to capture all remaining wild condors and focus its efforts on captive breeding.
The first attempts at reintroduction ended in disaster. Eight birds were released beginning in 1992 in Southern California by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but three of them died by power-line electrocution and one died by ingesting antifreeze. The young birds were naturally drawn to the high perches offered by the power-line poles, but their 9.5-foot wingspans could easily bridge two active lines, completing the electrical circuit and resulting in tragedy. Another early cohort, released by the Ventana Wildlife Society in 1997, imprinted on their human caretakers and, soon after release, flew toward offices and garages. They were quickly deemed unreleasable, and staff recaptured the surviving birds.
“We were in a panic,” says Kelly Sorenson, executive director of the Ventana Wildlife Society, reflecting on the early years. Scrambling to find a solution, biologists began working with adult birds who could teach the young condors how to act like condors. Later that year, with the mentor birds established, the Ventana Wildlife Society tried again—and it worked. There are now six release sites spread across California, Arizona, and Baja. “Each release site usually releases between four and 15 condors per year,” writes Alacia Welch, condor program manager at Pinnacles National Park.
Power-pole-aversion training of Condor 726, Little Stinker, was another condor conservation breakthrough—a technique now used at the Oregon Zoo, Los Angeles Zoo, and other captive-breeding sites. Flight pens for the young condors contain a mock power pole, charged with low voltage, that teaches the birds to avoid real power lines. As a result, the incidence of fatal electrocution fell. “It’s amazing how well that’s worked,” says Sorenson.
Through this process of trial and error, collaborators in condor conservation have refined their approach, enabling them to release young condors each year to the Central California flock and elsewhere. But the work doesn’t stop at release.
Maintaining the condors’ continued (and expanding) presence
Today, condor conservation involves a great deal of hands-on monitoring, maintenance, and support. “Basically, what I’m trying to do is see as many condors as I can every day,” says Joseph Belli, a conservation biologist and volunteer at Pinnacles National Park. Volunteers like Belli and NPS staff use radios to track condors (each tagged bird has its own frequency), aiming to get eyes or a signal on every bird at least once every three days. In addition to the radio transmitters, about half of the Central California flock has GPS trackers attached to their wings, which each costs thousands of dollars per bird. They are funded by a research grant from the Bay Area conservation nonprofit Save Mount Diablo.
Together, the teams at Pinnacles National Park and Ventana Wildlife Society co-manage the Central California condor flock, which includes just over 100 birds. At times, you can see up to 40 percent of the flock in one place, such as during staff-provisioned feedings, but often the birds congregate in smaller groups, with individual pairs—or at times, throuples or same-sex pairs—nesting in caverns and crevices. Described by one expert as “flying primates,” condors have elaborate social hierarchies, often on display when the birds gather to feed. The more dominant birds feed first, and the more submissive ones feed last. When new birds are brought to the flight pens, wild birds often greet them, going “beak-to-beak” through the fence, Belli says.
A growing number of Pinnacles and Big Sur birds have ventured north on summer jaunts to the Bay Area ever since 2004, when Condor 287 flew within two miles of Mount Hamilton. In 2006, Condor 307 flew near Sunol Regional Wilderness and Lake Del Valle, and in 2011, condors flew to Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. Then, in 2017 three condors again flew to Lake Del Valle, and in 2021, condors visited Mount Diablo for the first time since their extirpation. In 2024, a group of condors flew to Mount Diablo. One condor in the group, Condor 1099, continued north past the mountain—the farthest north a Central California condor has ever flown, according to Joe Burnett, California condor recovery program manager for the Ventana Wildlife Society. Each year, more of the birds fly north, bringing more condors to the Bay Area with every trip. “We think this trend will continue, albeit somewhat slow[ly],” writes Burnett. “Nonetheless, it’s trending upward.”
Though these Bay Area flights are promising, it may take many years for condors to establish nesting sites near the East Bay. At present, the farthest north they’ve nested is 25 miles north of Pinnacles National Park. Experts think that two factors limit their expansion: their highly social nature, which makes them prefer to nest in the vicinity of other birds, and lead poisoning, which keeps their populations well below the carrying capacity of their current nesting areas in Pinnacles and Big Sur.
Lead bullets: the condors’ final challenge
Lead poisoning kills 50 percent of all condors who die an identifiable death, and it is the biggest challenge condors still face, according to Welch. “When I pick up a bird I released 30 years ago that died of lead, it’s just heartbreaking,” says Burnett. “We can’t move forward until we get past lead poisoning.” As scavengers, condors are drawn to the carcasses of animals like coyotes, ground squirrels, and wild pigs, which often get shot and left to decay. Lead bullets, still in use although banned statewide since 2019, can splinter into tiny shards upon impact. Once ingested, the lead builds up in a condor’s system, ultimately leading to paralysis and death.
Sorenson says that the continued threat posed by lead bullets is primarily a market problem: They are often cheaper than nonleaded alternatives. In 2012, the Ventana Wildlife Society began handing out free boxes of unleaded ammunition to help slow the flow of lead into condors’ habitats and bloodstreams, with plans to expand the program.
But trying to change human behavior is a slow process, and every year condors die—many before reaching reproductive maturity, at age six to eight. And though condors can live more than 60 years, few live past their teens. It’s tough to turn the tide, but Burnett is optimistic: “I feel like we’re right there.”
Seeing condors in the Bay Area
Pinnacles and Big Sur are still the best places to see condors, for now. Spotting them in the East Bay is a coup, but it will take luck—and persistence. Birds only stay in the area a couple of days at a time, usually in August or September, and are often soaring thousands of feet overhead. “They might be flying over you and you’d never know,” says Sean Burke, land programs director with Save Mount Diablo. But listed below are places where your chances of seeing them are best. Some tips: Always go to the highest point you can reach; bring lots of water, some good binoculars, and a camera; and find yourself a bit of shade—you’ll be there for a while.
Santa Clara County
- Mount Hamilton
- Calaveras Reservoir
- Henry W. Coe State Park
- West side of Pacheco Pass
- Harvey Bear Ranch County Park
- Anderson Lake
- San Antonio Valley Ecological Reserve
- Eastern San José
Contra Costa County and Alameda County
- Mount Diablo
- Morgan Territory Regional Preserve
- Lake Del Valle
- Sunol Wilderness Regional Preserve
- Ohlone Wilderness Regional Preserve
What to look for: Scan the skies and look for a bird with a large wingspan and flat wings. In contrast to the rocking motion and V-shaped wing movement of a turkey vulture, condors glide smoothly, similar to golden eagles, according to Burke. Then look at the bird’s head. Condors have featherless heads; the adults have pink and orange skin, while the young ones’ heads are dark. Condors also have triangular white patches on the undersides of their wings, and all adults have numbered tags clipped to them.
If you have a good camera with a telephoto lens, snap a photo of the bird and zoom in later. You may be able to make out the numbers on the wing tags, which you can look up on CondorSpotter.com, an encyclopedia of California condors across their current range. Profiles of every condor living at Pinnacles are available at the national park’s webpage. Ventana Wildlife Society similarly shares biographies of all the birds they’ve released.
“I cannot wait for the day that I can take these transmitters off and these wing tags and look up and see a condor just like everybody else and not know who it is,” Burnett says. Only time will tell how long that will take.
