A California condor known to her handlers as B9 just made history. The two-year-old female covered 380 miles in four days, looping out of Redwood National Park in northern California, crossing into Oregon, and then flying back — becoming the first condor recorded in the state since 1904.
B9 was born in captivity and released into the wild in 2022 by the Yurok Tribe, whose Wildlife Department has spearheaded the condor's return to the Pacific Northwest. Conservationists tracked her route from the redwoods up past Redding, into Oregon near Medford, then on to Cave Junction and Brookings before she crossed back into California and returned home. Across the trip, she averaged nearly 100 miles a day.
'She flew almost 100 miles per day,' said Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department, 'which means she was really utilizing the landscape the way that only a condor can, really taking advantage of those mountains and riverways that give good flight corridors.'
It is the kind of milestone that, in the world of condor recovery, gets celebrated quietly and intensely. The California condor — North America's largest land bird, with a wingspan of nearly 10 feet — was hammered to the edge of extinction by lead poisoning, habitat loss, and DDT in the 20th century. By 1982, only 22 wild birds were left. Biologists made the wrenching decision to capture every remaining wild condor in 1987 and place them in a breeding program. The species was, for a few years, extinct in the wild.
Their slow return is one of the great American conservation stories. Releases began in the early 1990s. In 2016, the wild population crossed an invisible but important line — more chicks were born in the wild than wild birds died. Today there are roughly 276 condors flying free.
The Yurok-led release in the redwoods has added a new chapter. In February, a female condor in the program laid an egg in the hollow of a redwood tree deep inside the national park — the first condor egg laid in that landscape in more than a century. The egg ultimately failed to hatch, but Williams-Claussen described it as 'a really amazing milestone' even so.
'It's pretty common that eggs will fail in that first year, as these naive parents are really figuring it out,' she said.
B9's Oregon excursion fits a pattern biologists have been quietly hoping for. Released condors are exploring more of their historic range, testing flight corridors their ancestors used before the species was scraped down to nothing. Oregon was once squarely inside that range; the bird Lewis and Clark described seeing on the Columbia River in 1806 was almost certainly a California condor. After 122 years of absence, one of their descendants — born in a pen, released by a tribe whose ancestors knew these birds well — chose to look around.
The Yurok Tribe has been central to that recovery. Condors hold deep cultural significance in Yurok tradition, and the tribe partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and Redwood National Park to establish the northern California release site. B9 is one of more than a dozen birds released into the redwoods since the program began in 2022.
She is back home now, presumably resting after her long flight. But she has shown the rest of the flock what is possible — and given biologists a small, soaring data point that the comeback is still moving in the right direction.
