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.
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