“Prey-go-neesh… was one of  the first people of the world,"    "and one of the most powerful  beings in Yurok cosmology." "He is a sacred spirit, a scavenger who  never partakes of killing or violence." "Instead he takes directly and transforms it  back into life, the purest form of renewal." "This, combined with his ability to  fly the highest, equipped him as" "the messenger to carry Yurok prayers to the  heavens to be received by the creator.” [ ♪ INTRO ♪ ] On April 19, 1987, around am,  conservationists in the hills of Southern California  fired four small cannons  at one of the rarest birds in the world.

This particular individual, a 7-year-old male  with a nearly-three-meter wingspan named AC-9,   was wanted by the federal government. His urgent capture had been  authorized for one simple reason.

As far as anyone could tell, AC-9 was the  last known wild individual of his species: North America’s largest bird,   Gymnogyps californianus, better  known as the California Condor. As AC-9 became entangled in the  heavy cannon net fired over him,   and was taken into the care of humans,  his species became extinct in the wild. And, for the first and only time  in tens of thousands of years,   the skies of California were entirely condor-free.

Every remaining individual had been rounded up,   taken into captivity, and put  on ecological life-support. 27 endlings were all that  remained of this species. Many people were convinced that this gigantic relic  of the Pleistocene Epoch  would never see the 21st century. But thanks to one of the  most intensive and expensive   last-ditch conservation efforts in history, the California Condor was  pulled back from the brink.

And proving that we could save a  species even at the very final hour may have changed the field  of conservation, forever. [ ♪ ] For at least 40,000 years, the terrestrial  species of the North American West Coast   have lived and died in the shadows of a  giant, soaring through the skies above. The California Condor, or Prey-go-neesh  to the Indigenous Yurok people, is a member of the family of  vultures found in the Americas, a scavenger that ranged all the way from  British Columbia to Baja California. It was arguably even the  continent’s ultimate scavenger, a huge and charismatic survivor of  the Pleistocene that had once feasted on the bodies of woolly mammoths, giant sloths,  beached whales, and other enormous mammals that littered the land.

And it’s a species that watched  a lot of change unfold below, the depths of the last ice age, the arrival  of humans, the demise of the megafauna, and the start of the anthropocene. Surveying every inch of the  landscape, through it all. Through, almost all of it, that is.

Because the California condor never got to  see a five year window between 1987 and 1992, the years that the entire species  was brought into human care,   with the final capture of AC-9 from the wild. So how did the condors spiral so badly that  we humans had to round up these giant birds, bring them all inside for five years, and,  also, get really into condor puppetry,   just to save them from total extinction? Well, the reason we got so unusually-hands-on   to save this species is because their  brush with oblivion was entirely our fault.

While they’d seen a lot of change come and go, and  survived massive ecological transformation before, condors were not prepared for  the new kinds of pressures that came with the massive westward expansion  of European settlers in the 19th century. One of the big problems was that  those people would just shoot them, either as pests or often simply for fun, because they were an unusually big and  ugly-enough thing to be interesting to shoot. Plus, a trade in condor skins,  feathers, and eggs sprung up, partly as museums and collectors around the world   began hearing tales about  this absurdly gigantic bird, and paid handsomely for specimens  to add to their collections.

Now, these big, slow-reproducing condors  hadn’t been exactly common to begin with. But by the late 1800s, naturalists had already  started to notice that they were becoming rare. And in 1939, the species was estimated  at 60 to 100 individuals in total, living only between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It was clear that something had to be done to save  the California condor, but it was not clear what. This sparked a debate between two groups that  argued for completely opposite solutions. One side argued that the best thing we could  offer this population was some personal space.

Give them more and better habitat,  give them more legal protection,   and then leave them alone to recover in peace, away from us humans who’d been  causing them so much trouble. But another side argued for  a more hands-on approach: we got them into this mess, and it  was up to us to get them out. Rather than just offering them more habitat  and protection and hoping for the best, we should instead take them under our proverbial   wings and actively manage their  recovery as closely as possible… Something that would have to  involve capturing individuals   from the wild and breeding them under our control.

The debate raged for around 20 years,   touching on everything from the  ethics of taking wild animals captive, to whether such a breeding program was  even financially or practically viable. Plus, to a lot of people, the California condor  was more than just an unusually enormous bird. For Indigenous people, like the Yurok Tribe,   it represents a sacred and  important part of their cosmology that was deeply painful to  lose from the landscape.

And many other people were repulsed at the idea of   taking condors captive in  the name of conservation. This species had become a  powerful symbol of wild nature,   defined by the sense of freedom that it embodied. Caging them would rob them of that defining  essence and reduce them to little more   than what one conservationist  described as “feathered pigs.” By 1980, scientists realized that another  factor was at play in the condors' decline… One that had been overlooked  before, but that added new   urgency to the debate and probably meant that no amount of habitat and space  would be enough to save them.

Because, by feeding on the remains  of the animals that we killed, a devastating new poison had  begun to enter their diets, embedded in the bodies of the  carcasses they scavenged: lead. See, you might assume that one of  the few benefits to the condors of the arrival of trigger-happy settlers  who hunted game and herded livestock, would be that there were suddenly more  animal carcasses around to feed on. And while, yes, that was true,   it actually turned out to be one of the  most important drivers of their decline.

Because as the condors ingested  fragments of the ammunition left   in the carcasses, they got lead poisoning. And while scientists only confirmed that  this was happening in the mid-1970s, it's likely that lead poisoning had  been responsible for the deaths of   hundreds of condors over the prior century. The revelation of a hidden threat of this scale  so late in the game for the remaining condors, numbering around two dozen by the 1980s, massively intensified calls to begin a  captive breeding program without delay.

If the whole state was laced  with accidental poison bait, then simply being outside was now the most  immediate risk to the condors’ survival. The question then became something more  like ‘do we take them into captivity, or do we just let them die wild with dignity’. So, in the early 1980s, an  intensive field effort was launched,   backed by the state and federal governments, to find condor eggs, chicks, and  adults, and bring them into human care.

And in 1986, the controversial decision was  made by the US Department of the Interior to authorize the capture of  every known remaining condor, a mission that was successfully achieved the  following year with the cannon-netting of AC-9… In effect, deliberately making them extinct in  the wild before the poison could do it for us. The 27 remaining condors could now be kept  safe, but they were not out of the woods… I mean, apart from being literally  out of the woods now, obviously. Because the next phase of the recovery  project was the most critical: figuring out how to carefully manage  the future of an entire species.

From feeding them, to breeding them,  to hatching them, to caring for them, all without making them so dependent on us that  they’d lose their ability to survive in the wild. In some ways, looking after the giant  birds turned out to actually be quite easy. According to one Conservation Manager: “Their needs are fairly simple." "You just throw some dead animals  in there for them to eat and then,"   "you know, we have a lot of eggs.” But other aspects proved to be much more tricky – including how to feed chicks that didn’t  have an experienced adult available to do it, while preventing them from becoming too  accustomed to humans at such a young age.

Enter the puppets. The keepers worked with a local artist to design   a hand-puppet based on the  likeness of an adult condor, allowing them to feed the chicks  as a parent normally would,   without the birds imprinting on humans. And they also created a kind  of ‘condor pre-school’ where   they were sent to hang out with other condors, get a little mentorship,  and learn how to socialize.

But there was some tough love needed, too, the keepers didn’t just want to stop  the condors from liking us too much, they needed to instill an  active aversion to humans, strong enough to convince them to stay away  from us in their potentially wild future. One exercise involved suddenly  letting the condor chicks see a human, and then having a group of biologists  immediately rush them and flip them upside down. As one leader of the conservation program put it: ‘‘[a] good day is when you have condors throwing  up all over at the mere sight of a person.’’ All in all, the conservation program was  one of the most intensive ever devised, and has cost over 35 million dollars and counting.

But eventually, it paid off. After a 5-year bout of  extinction in the wild, in 1992, the first captive-raised condors were  reintroduced in Ventura County, California. Many others would follow… Including AC-9 himself, who was  returned to the wild in 2002,   15 years after being taken into human care.

In total, AC-9 fathered 22 chicks  and was a foster dad to two more – almost as many as the entire population  of his species when he was caught. As one of the last condors  to have been wild-hatched,   and as a guy who clearly  knew how to spread his genes, it was hoped that he would  be a role model for future   generations that had only ever known captivity. Today, the bold, last-ditch,   and often controversial project  to save the California condor is considered to be one of modern conservation  biology’s greatest success stories.

From teetering on the brink of imminent extinction  in 1987, as of 2025, there are now 607 of them. With over half – 392 – living free in  the wild, though closely monitored. But lead poisoning continues  to be a major threat, it was responsible for about half of  all condor deaths between 1992 to 2022.

And despite California implementing a state-wide   ban on shooting wildlife  with lead ammunition in 2019, not all hunters seem to have made the switch, too many condors are still being poisoned for  the wild population to be self-sustaining. For now at least, the species  remains on life support. And without the captive breeding program topping  up the wild population with regular introductions, they would quickly fall back  into an extinction spiral.

But the story of the California condor,  and our desperate scramble to save it, represents a seismic shift in what modern  conservation strategies can look like. It provided a blueprint for rebuilding a  species from the ground up entirely in captivity while keeping its wild spirit intact, and the resources it takes to do so. From cannon nets, to hand puppets, to  preschools, to scheduled bullying sessions.

But it forces us to ask an  important question, too: Why do some species get tens of millions  of dollars and decades of intensive,   tailored conservation effort, while others are allowed to quietly fade away? To some degree the answer is obvious. Condors are huge, they're charismatic, and they have  deep cultural significance to many people. 35 million dollars to save them  actually feels like a pretty good deal.

That’s roughly the cost of a  single high-end private jet, to save one of the biggest and most awe-inspiring  species that North America has left. But that doesn’t mean it is the most important  or necessarily deserving of our help. Smaller, less flashy species that don’t have a   place in our collective imagination go  extinct all the time across the world, even ones that we know play  important roles in their ecosystems.

We could go all-in on saving many of them,  too, if we tried, but we usually don’t. Think of all the newts, beetles,  or parasitic wasps we could save   with 35 million dollars worth  of targeted conservation – each. What is the purpose of conservation, really?

Protecting overall ecological  diversity and stability? Or prioritizing the survival of a select group of   our personal favorites from  across the tree of life? We have so severely degraded so  many ecosystems around the world that the list of species that desperately  needs. our help is long and growing.

And while emergency captive breeding programs  were, and still often are, deeply controversial, they may have to become much  more common in cases where   habitat protection alone simply won’t be enough. Even if it means a lot of money, even if it  means the species loses a little dignity, and even if it means purposefully making them  extinct in the wild for some amount of time. And, crucially, even if the  species itself isn’t gigantic,   flamboyant, or wrapped in cultural significance.

The California condors' brush  with extinction helped prove that intensive and well-funded captive  conservation projects can work, even if implemented desperately at the final hour. But the question is, which other species will  we deem worthy of such emergency measures? For now though, the California condor has  gained yet another layer of symbolic importance… Along with being a giant Ice Age survivor,   a revered sacred spirit, and a  living embodiment of freedom, it is also a bittersweet reminder that it's  almost never too late to save a species, so every extinction is a choice. [ ♪ ] We wanted to give some special thanks to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance for letting us use their images in this episode.

Finding images of these critters is not easy, so we really appreciate the ability to work with them to show these animals to you. [ ♪ OUTRO ♪ ]