the first california condor that reached the ancestral land of Yurok in more than a century arrived by plane and car in late March 2022. The small plane carrying Condor 746 had a rough landing and the bird was excitable. He rattled around in a large dog crate during the three-hour drive to the tribe’s newly built condor facility, in a remote location in Redwood National Park.
Once there, he jumped into the flying cage, a high wire mesh fence furnished with wooden perches and a drinking basin. At 8 years old, Condor 746 is an adult, its naked head a bright pink instead of the black found in younger birds. He is on loan from the captive breeding program of the Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho. His job is to mentor four young birds who will become the founders of a reborn condor society in Yurok land.
“We have mentors because condors are so social,” said Joe Burnett, California Condor Recovery Program Manager at the Ventana Wildlife Society. Young birds in a coop without an adult will become unmanageable. “You get the lord of the flies syndrome,” says Burnett. He and his colleagues soon learned that ransom programs require an adult to serve as a role model and enforce the social hierarchy critical to the survival of the herd.
A few days after 746 arrived, Condor A0, 2 years old, entered the flight pen. The first thing she focused on was 746, lounging on a bass. Realizing she was in a safe place, A0 checked the food—the carcass of a stillborn calf—then flapped on a perch and tufted her feathers, a sign of contentment to the birds. Three young male condors, labeled A1, A2, and A3 followed. The youths had lived together for months in other condor facilities in Boise, Idaho and San Simeon, California, and already felt at home with each other.
Condor, known as prey-go-neesh in the native language, is sacred to the Yurok people. The Yurok Reservation is located along the Klamath River in northwestern California, but much of the tribe’s ancestral lands are now owned by government agencies or private landowners. The tribe has been working to bring back the California condor since 2003, when a group of elders identified the bird as a keystone species for both culture and ecology, and therefore the most important creature on land in need of restoration.
Nineteen years after the Yurok made that bold decision, the condors arrived. Elders who had worked toward that pivotal moment watched as Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Wildlife Department, and her colleagues put each newcomer into the pen.
Williams-Claussen’s job is to understand the details of condor biology and interpret Yurok culture for the rest of the world. A tribesman, she grew up on the coast at the mouth of the Klamath and attended Harvard University. She didn’t want to be a condor biologist, but when she returned in 2007 with a degree in biochemical sciences, condor restoration was the job her people needed. Williams-Claussen has since lived and breathed condors for 14 years, learning how to handle them, building partnerships with government agencies, and listening to what Yurok elders have to say about the big bird.
The California condor is a critically endangered species: in the 1980s the total population decreased to less than 30 individuals. Biologists concluded that the species’ only chance of survival lay in catching every living condor to breed the birds in captivity, protected from poisons and power lines.
However, reintroducing condors to the wild proved difficult, and the process became a dramatic lesson for biologists about the importance of parenting and the slow pace of growing up among these long-lived, highly social birds. Scientists found that time spent with adults was critical to the behavioral development of young condors. They also found that in a species where adults follow and protect their offspring for a year or more after the birds have fledged, young pioneers in condorless landscapes require a lot of human babysitting.
