California condors nesting in Pacific Northwest for first time in a century

A bird that nearly vanished from Earth entirely may now be raising its first chick in the Pacific Northwest in more than a century. In early February 2026, a female California condor named Ney-gem’ Ne-chween-kah — Yurok for “She carries our prayers” — appears to have laid an egg inside a hollow old-growth redwood tree deep in the backcountry of Redwood National Park. Her mate, Hlow Hoo-let, or “At last I fly,” has been sharing incubation duties. Both birds were released by the Yurok Tribe in 2022 as part of the Northern California Condor Restoration Program.

• The California condor’s entire global population fell to just 22 individuals in 1982. A December 2025 count by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put that number at 607 — a 27-fold increase over four decades of recovery work.
• The two nesting condors were among the first cohort released by the Yurok Tribe in May 2022. At nearly seven years old, they are right at the cusp of sexual maturity for the species, which typically begins breeding between the ages of six and seven.
• Twenty-four condors now fly within Yurok ancestral territory, and the Northern California Condor Restoration Program plans to release at least one new cohort every summer for the next 20 years, with a goal of establishing a self-sustaining Pacific Northwest flock.

The nest site is too remote to confirm the egg directly — no roads reach it, and a creek forms an impassable barrier. Biologists are tracking the pair via wing-mounted satellite transmitters and monitoring behavioral shifts, including changes in feeding rates and the alternating pattern of incubation the species uses. If the egg exists, it would take 55 to 58 days to hatch.

A species that came back from the edge of extinction

The California condor’s recovery story is one of the most dramatic in the history of wildlife conservation. By 1987, the situation had grown so desperate that every surviving individual was captured from the wild and placed in a last-ditch captive breeding program. There were 27 birds left.

Reintroductions into the wild began in 1991 in Southern California. The program expanded over the following decades to Central California, Arizona, Baja California in Mexico, and — with the Yurok Tribe’s leadership — the Pacific Northwest. The December 2025 population count of 607 birds represents a recovery spanning more than three decades of coordinated breeding, release, monitoring, and public education.

Still, the species remains critically endangered. Lead poisoning from ammunition fragments in animal carcasses is the leading cause of condor mortality. Avian influenza killed more than 20 birds in the Southwest flock in recent years. A young condor from the Yurok program — Pey-noh-pey-o-wok’, or “I am friend” — died of lead poisoning in January 2025 at just 18 months old, the first loss for the Northern California flock. He had been flying free for only a few months.

Why the Yurok Tribe led this effort — and what it means

The Yurok Tribe did not begin this program in 2022. They began it in 2003, when a panel of tribal elders formally designated the California condor — known as prey-go-neesh in the Yurok language — as the top priority for land-based species restoration on their ancestral territory. What followed was nearly two decades of feasibility studies, contaminant risk assessments, and partnership building before the first four birds were released.

For the Yurok people, prey-go-neesh is not simply a conservation target. The condor appears in Yurok creation stories and plays a central role in World Renewal ceremonies, where its feathers and songs carry prayers for restoring balance to the earth. Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Wildlife Department, has described her tribe as “world renewal people, or fix-the-earth people, whose primary purpose is to keep the world in balance.” The condor’s disappearance from Yurok ancestral territory was understood as part of a broader ecological and cultural disruption that followed colonization. Bringing it back is understood as part of healing both.

The condors’ disappearance from the North Coast followed the arrival of European settlers, who used lead bullets and strychnine to kill large game and predators — poisoning the carrion-feeding raptors as a consequence. Condors documented by Lewis and Clark along the Columbia River in 1804 and 1805 were largely gone from the region within a century.

What nesting in an old-growth redwood actually signals

The nest site itself carries ecological meaning. Old-growth redwoods provide cavity nesting sites that younger trees cannot offer. The old-growth forests along Redwood Creek drainage in Humboldt County — some of the last intact stands of their kind in California — are precisely the habitat condors relied on before their disappearance. The fact that the birds chose this site rather than a constructed nest box is a sign that the habitat remains viable.

Estelle Sandhaus, director of conservation and science at the Santa Barbara Zoo, told the Spokesman-Review that when a species reintroduction produces breeding behavior in the wild, it represents the key milestone biologists look for — evidence that animals are not just surviving but integrating into the ecosystem. Survival, adaptation, and breeding are the three markers of a successful reintroduction. The Yurok program is now approaching all three.

Program leaders are cautious. First-time condor parents frequently fail to hatch their first egg due to inexperience with incubation. The remote nest site means biologists cannot intervene if things go wrong. Whether this attempt succeeds or not, the program will continue releasing birds annually for two decades.

What matters is that a pair of condors — birds born in captivity at the Oregon Zoo and the World Center for Birds of Prey — chose a hollow in an ancient redwood in the rain-soaked hills of Humboldt County to begin the next chapter of their species. That choice was made possible by a tribe that spent 20 years working to make it happen.

This story was originally reported by Mongabay.