How Many California Condors Are Left? Recovery Numbers

How many California condors are there today?

The California condor is still one of the rarest birds on Earth, but its numbers have grown steadily for more than three decades. The official count at the end of 2025 was 607 birds. More than half live in the wild, and the rest live in captive breeding programs at zoos and specialist centers that hatch chicks for release.

The free-flying condors are split into several flocks:

• Central California, around Big Sur and Pinnacles National Park.
• Southern California, in the mountains north of Los Angeles.
• Arizona and Utah, around the Vermilion Cliffs, the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park.
• Baja California, Mexico, in the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir.
• Northern California, on Yurok Tribe lands near Redwood National Park, where releases began in 2022.

Almost every wild condor is tagged and tracked, so biologists know the birds as individuals, with numbers and often names. That is why the counts are unusually precise for a wild animal.

From 22 birds to hundreds: a timeline

Condor numbers fell for more than a century before the recovery began. The main steps were:

The decision to capture every wild condor in the 1980s was hugely controversial. Some conservationists argued that the birds should be left free, even if the species might vanish. Others said the wild population was dying so fast that captive breeding was the only chance. Looking back, the gamble worked: all of today’s condors descend from those 27 birds.

How did captive breeding bring condors back?

Condors breed very slowly. A pair raises at most one chick every year or two, and young birds do not breed until they are about 6 years old. To speed things up, biologists used a trick called double clutching. When the first egg of the season was removed and hatched in an incubator, the parents usually laid a second egg, and sometimes a third.

Chicks hatched in captivity were fed with hand puppets shaped like adult condor heads, so they would grow up identifying with condors rather than with people. Young birds were later raised in groups with adult “mentor” condors to learn normal behavior. Before release, they were also trained to avoid power lines, which had killed many of the first released birds.

The main breeding centers have included the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, the Los Angeles Zoo, the Oregon Zoo, The Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey in Idaho and Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City.

Why are there still so few condors?

The biggest obstacle is lead poisoning. Condors feed on carcasses and on gut piles left behind after big game is shot, and they swallow small fragments of lead bullets. Between 1992 and 2013, lead caused more than half of the known deaths of free-flying juvenile and adult condors. California banned lead ammunition in condor range in 2008 and across the whole state from 2019, but lead is still a serious problem, especially in Arizona and Utah.

Many wild condors are trapped once or twice a year so their blood can be tested. Birds with dangerous lead levels are taken to treatment centers and released again once they recover. Without this constant care, biologists expect the wild flocks would decline again.

Other threats include:

• Microtrash, such as bottle caps and glass, which parents mistake for bone and feed to their chicks.
• Bird flu: an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2023 killed 21 condors in the Arizona and Utah flock, and biologists started vaccinating condors in response.
• Slow breeding, which means any extra deaths of adults take many years to replace.

Is the California condor still endangered?

Yes. The IUCN lists the California condor as Critically Endangered, its highest category for species still living in the wild. It is also protected as endangered under the US Endangered Species Act.

The population trend is upward, and the condor is often called a conservation success story. But it is a success that still needs intensive management. The recovery plan aims for wild flocks that can sustain themselves without regular releases and treatment, and that goal has not yet been reached. The species also appears on our list of endangered animals.

Will California condors survive?

There are good reasons for hope. Wild-hatched chicks now fledge every year, condors have returned to places such as Zion National Park and the redwood coast, and in 2026 a condor was seen flying in southern Oregon for the first time in more than a century.

Whether condors can one day live without human help depends mostly on how quickly lead disappears from their food. If lead exposure falls, the species could keep growing on its own. If it does not, the condor will need people to keep rescuing it for the foreseeable future.