I don’t know when I started looking for California condors in the sky. It must have been when I was a child growing up in Humboldt County, before I understood that the vultures were, at the time, extinct in the wild. I only knew they were rare and exciting creatures—the largest land birds in North America, their wingspans reaching 10 feet. With youthful hubris, I believed I was the special one to whom they would reveal themselves, and when they did, I’d be watching. Of course that never happened, but I still check for a condor whenever a large black shadow circles above me. It’s almost always a turkey vulture.
Perhaps, in my searching, I sensed the ecological absence of condors. Historically, they roamed the Pacific coast up to Vancouver and as far east as Arizona, snacking on the decaying flesh of elephant seals and elk and everything in between—vultures aren’t picky. Their comeback, from around 20 individuals in the 1980s to more than 500 wild birds today, is a feat of conservation. It’s inspiring to think about the dedication and human effort it took to bring the species back, until you consider that people put them in this position in the first place.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Indeed, tracking condor conservation is an emotional teeter-totter. In September 2024 alone, four condors were set free in Arizona. But a few days earlier, a condor previously released in Zion National Park had died of lead poisoning, the number-one threat to the species, as they eat the fragments of bullets in carcasses. Another condor dared to venture into Colorado, the first to do so in centuries, and was promptly shot. This loss was extra sad because the bird had just survived avian flu, only to be killed by, I assume, some slack-jawed yokel.
Condors are bellwethers of the imbalance of the world around us, showing how environmental destruction harms indirectly as well as directly. And yet there’s something irrepressible and opportunistic about them. When I finally saw three condors fly at Pinnacles National Park, as part of an assignment for this magazine, I was struck by how colorful they were: the rainbow tones of their faces, the white streaks in their wings, the ruby beads of their eyes. When they launched into the sky, they demonstrated the immaculate power of an animal doing what it was born to do, akin to the gallop of a horse or the spring of a tiger. Condors are made to fly, and in that flight I could see the promise of the species, the literal rise above humanity to make a comeback because of us, and despite us. Maybe one day in my lifetime, I’ll look up out of my ingrained habit to check for a California condor circling in the sky—and see one.•
Joy Lanzendorfer’s first novel, Right Back Where We Started From, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Raritan, the Atlantic, and Ploughshares as well as on NPR and for the Poetry Foundation, among others.
