How biologists came to catch the last wild California condor on purpose - and why it was the decision that saved the species.
There is a man lying in a hole in the ground. He dug it himself, just wide enough for his shoulders, and he has been folded into it for hours, in the cold, not moving. Fifty yards away, out in the open dirt, lies the carcass of a goat. And the man is waiting - for the last one.
Somewhere above him, riding a column of warm air on wings that stretch nearly ten feet across, is a single bird: the last wild California condor left on planet Earth. This is the story of how we came to catch it on purpose, why the people who loved it most begged us to stop, and what happened to that bird fifteen years later.
A living relic of the Ice Age
To understand the man in the pit, you have to understand what a California condor is, because it is not a normal bird. Picture a wingspan of nine and a half feet - wider than the ceiling of most rooms is tall. A condor can weigh over twenty pounds and stay aloft for hours without a single flap, reading the heat coming off the land and drifting a hundred miles in an afternoon. Its head is bald and orange and prehistoric, because this is a scavenger: it puts that head inside dead things, and feathers would only hold the rot.
This bird is a relic - a living leftover from the Ice Age. Ten thousand years ago, condors rode the skies over saber-toothed cats, dire wolves and giant ground sloths, and when all of those animals died out, the condor kept flying. It soared over the Grand Canyon, over the Pacific coast, over the first people to set foot in North America, who looked up and called it the thunderbird. It survived the mammoths. It survived every predator the continent could invent. And then it met us.
The invisible killer
By the middle of the twentieth century, the thunderbird was vanishing, and for a long time nobody could say exactly why. The birds were not being shot in great numbers. Their nesting cliffs above Los Angeles were protected. And yet, every year, there were fewer - forty, then thirty - like watching sand run out of a glass and being unable to find the hole.
Then they found the hole, and it was almost too quiet to believe: the condors were being poisoned. Not on purpose, and not by pesticides, but by lead. A hunter shoots a deer and leaves the gut pile, or wounds an animal that dies later; inside that meat are fragments of the lead bullet, shattered into pieces smaller than grains of rice. To a condor gliding overhead, that carcass is exactly what it has evolved over ten thousand years to find - a free meal. So it feeds, and it swallows the lead. One fragment is sometimes all it takes. Lead shuts down the digestive system, so the bird slowly starves on a full stomach, grows too weak to fly, and dies on the ground. The condors were being killed by their own greatest strength - the very thing that let them outlast the Ice Age. They were built to eat the dead. We simply changed what the dead were made of.
Twenty-two birds
By the early 1980s the sand was almost gone. In 1982, biologists did the count no one wanted to do. The total number of California condors left alive in the entire world was twenty-two. Twenty-two birds. You could have fit every one of them on a single school bus - a species that had ruled the western sky since the Ice Age, down to a number you could count on your fingers and toes.
The argument that split conservation
And that is when the fight started, because now there was a decision to make, and it split the people who loved this bird right down the middle. On one side were scientists who said: we have to catch them - all of them, every last wild condor - bring them into the zoos in San Diego and Los Angeles, breed them behind fences where no lead can reach them, and someday let their children go free. On the other side were some of the most passionate conservationists in America, including the Audubon Society and the legendary environmentalist David Brower. Their argument was not stupid; it was heartbreaking. A condor in a cage, they said, is not a condor. It is a thing of cliffs and thermals and open sky, and if you put the last of them in pens you have not saved the species - you have turned it into a zoo exhibit. Better to let it stay wild, even if wild meant watching it die free.
It is one of the hardest questions in all of conservation, and it is worth sitting in for a moment, because there is no easy answer: what do you owe a wild thing - its freedom, or its future? They sued the government to stop the captures. Then nature ended the argument. Over the single winter of 1984 into 1985, the wild flock lost bird after bird - nearly half of the free-flying condors, gone in a matter of months, mostly to lead. At that rate there would soon be no condors left to argue about. The courts cleared the way. The decision was made: bring them all in.
Easter Sunday, 1987
Through 1985 and 1986, one by one, the biologists caught the last wild condors and carried them to a safety they never asked for. By the spring of 1987, a single condor was still out there, still riding the thermals over the hills north of Los Angeles, still - as far as he knew - free. The biologists knew him well; in the flat language of the field notes he had a code name, AC-9, Adult Condor Nine, but to the people who tracked him every day he was Igor, a young male about six years old, in the prime of his life. He was the last one.
Which brings us back to the man in the hole. His name is Pete Bloom, and he is very, very good at catching enormous birds that do not want to be caught. Out in the open lay the bait - the goat carcass. Buried around it was a cannon net, launchers that would fire a net up and over anything standing there faster than a bird can leap into the air. Bloom ran the wire nearly a hundred feet back to his pit, and then he did the hardest part of the job: he waited. Hours, not moving, because a condor can spot a carcass, and a threat, from a mile up, and one wrong shift of a shoulder and the last wild condor on Earth simply rides the wind somewhere else, lost maybe for good.
And then a shadow crossed the ground. Igor came down the way condors do - not diving but spiraling, patient, circling lower and lower on those enormous wings. He landed, folded ten feet of wing, walked toward the goat with that strange rocking condor stride, and lowered his bald orange head to feed. Pete hit the switch. The cannons fired, the net snapped over the bird before he could open his wings, and just like that - after ten thousand years - the sky over North America was empty. It was Easter Sunday, 1987. They carried Igor off the hill in a pet carrier. He was the twenty-seventh bird, the last piece. The thunderbird was extinct in the wild, on purpose, at the hands of the people trying to save it.
The bet
If the story ended there it would just be a sad one - the day we gave up and locked the wilderness in a cage. But those scientists were making a brutal, unpopular, all-or-nothing bet: that it is better to save a thing than to watch it die beautifully. Behind the fences in San Diego and Los Angeles, the condors did the one thing everyone was praying for. They bred. In the spring of 1988, one year after Igor came out of the sky, the first California condor chick ever hatched in captivity broke out of its shell. They named her Molloko - a word from the Maidu people that means condor. Then another chick, and another. The number that had fallen to twenty-two began, for the first time in living memory, to climb. In 1992, five years after the sky went empty, they opened the pens and began giving them back, releasing young captive-born condors into the mountains of California to ride the thermals their grandparents rode.
AC-9 goes home
And here is the part the whole story has been walking toward. Remember Igor - AC-9, the last wild condor, the one whose capture broke people’s hearts and felt, to so many, like the final defeat. In 2002, fifteen years after Pete Bloom pulled him out of the air, biologists carried AC-9 back up into those same California mountains, opened the door of a flight pen, and let him go. The last wild condor on Earth became one of the first ones home. He spread nearly ten feet of wing, caught the heat rising off the land the way his kind has for ten thousand years, and flew free again - and out there, in the wild, he fathered chicks of his own.
Sometimes you have to be willing to cage the last one - to un-cage the next thousand.
Where condors fly today
Today there are more than six hundred California condors alive, and more than half of them are not in any cage. They are out there right now - over the Grand Canyon, over the cliffs of Big Sur, over the redwoods of northern California where they had not been seen in a hundred years. Every single one is descended from that tiny group of twenty-seven, and from a heartbreaking decision, and from a man in a hole in the ground who caught the very last one so that there could be a next one.
The people who fought the captures were not wrong to fight - a wild thing belongs in the sky. But it turned out there was a third answer nobody in that courtroom could promise. The condor is still not safe: lead poisoning remains its single greatest threat, which is why switching to non-lead, copper ammunition is the most powerful thing a hunter can do to keep these birds flying. The thunderbird survived the mammoths. It survived the saber-toothed cat. It nearly did not survive us. But it is still up there - and now you know what it cost to keep it flying.
Sourcing note: capture details are drawn from biologist Pete Bloom’s first-hand account; AC-9 was captured over Easter weekend, April 1987, and released back to the wild in 2002. This article accompanies Episode 1 of the Huck Podcast - listen above for the full story.