Essential California Send to friend | Open in browser Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, July 24, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. California condors are massive, primordial creatures. The birds have remained relatively unchanged since the Pleistocene Age, surviving long after the mastodons whose carcasses they once fed upon had been relegated to museum exhibits. Mighty condors once circled the abyss of extinction. But this month, officials are celebrating a once unthinkable milestone: the birth of the 1,000th California condor chick since a massive recovery program was undertaken more than three decades ago. The condor recovery program is now largely the topic of rosy headlines touting the new chicks, but that wasn’t always the case. Once it was radical. When it first unspooled in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, the last-ditch effort to save the condors generated more than enough drama to populate a prestige miniseries, complete with schisms that roiled the environmental community, expensive zoo rivalries and lingering lawsuits. “For as long as people — humans — were thought to have hunted and foraged in North America, the condors have been there the whole time and before,” Chris Parish, the director of global conservation at the Peregrine Fund, explained. But their numbers had dwindled to roughly a hundred by the turn of the last century and plummeted even further amid the rapid postwar development of the 1950s. The condor was placed on the federal endangered species list in 1967. By the early 1980s, the great birds were at the gates of oblivion, with the last of their kind slowly dying out by the tens in Los Padres National Forest. The recovery proposal, which first made waves in 1976, necessitated capturing the birds in the wild, where they had been for tens of thousands of years, and then attempting to breed them in captivity in zoos. They would then eventually be returned to their California habitats, but only if the efforts were successful. Many had their doubts about whether gargantuan birds bred in zoos could ever successfully re-adapt to the wild. There were people — powerful conservationists and wilderness activists — who would rather see the mighty condor go extinct than be relegated to zoos, even temporarily. Internecine warfare was waged in the ecological community, as groups took sides over whether we humans should interfere with the slow march of natural selection. Of course, the birds were more than just birds. They were rife with symbolism. And the forfeiting of their wildness was unthinkable to many. That the federal government and private groups planned to play God through a risky, untested program only added insult to injury. A male condor starts to take flight north of Fillmore after being released from a kennel by Joseph Brandt, left, a condor biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At right is Devon Pryor, a conservation and research associate at the Santa Barbara Zoo. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times) David Brower, an environmentalist who was pivotal in some of the largest conservation victories of the 20th century, argued that creating “synthetic” environments where condors would be dependent on their human breeders would constitute “a kind of immorality.” The dispute was dramatic and bitter, but after “years of verbal battles and jurisdictional disputes — between state and federal wildlife officials, Los Angeles and San Diego Zoo officials, environmentalists and government biologists” as our coverage put it at the time, a trapping program finally began in the mountain wilds north and east of Los Angeles in 1983. At the time, there were just 22 condors left. The last wild California condor was captured in April 1987. The next year heralded the arrival of the very first condor to be conceived and hatched in captivity. It was referred to as the “$20-million baby,” since that’s what the program had cost by then. The first birds were released from captivity in 1992. It took them several hours to take flight. The living condor population has now risen above 500, with more than half of those birds successfully living free in the wild in parts of California, Utah, Arizona and northern Mexico. “The potential recovery of the condor gives me greater hope,” Chris Parish, the conservation director who had worked on the program, said. “Not just for the bird itself, but for society — in our ability to identify when there’s a problem, identify what the problem is and then work to fix that problem.” “Our success in doing that time and time again is what gives me hope,” Parish continued. “And that’s what I see when I see the condor flying out there.”