Critically Endangered
California condor
Gymnogyps californianus
Its 3.0 m (9.8 ft) wingspan is the widest of any North American bird, and its weight of up to 14 kg (31 lb) nearly equals that of the trumpeter swan, the heaviest among native North American bird species.
Appearance
The adult California condor is a uniform black with the exception of large triangular patches or bands of white on the underside of the wings. It has gray legs and feet, an ivory-colored bill, a frill of black feathers surrounding the base of the neck, and brownish red eyes. The juvenile is mostly a mottled dark brown with blackish coloration on the head.
Its 3.0 m (9.8 ft) wingspan is the widest of any North American bird, and its weight of up to 14 kg (31 lb) nearly equals that of the trumpeter swan, the heaviest among native North American bird species.
Overall length ranges from 109 to 140 cm (43 to 55 in) and wingspan from 2.49 to 3 m (8 ft 2 in to 9 ft 10 in).
Published measurements include mass about 8.45.
Range and habitat
At the time of human settlement of the Americas, the California condor was widespread across North America. Condor bones from the late Pleistocene have been found at the Cutler Fossil Site in southern Florida. Even so, at the end of the last glacial period came the extinction of the megafauna that led to a subsequent reduction in range and population. Faunal remains of condors have been found documented in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas.
The species is listed by IUCN as critically endangered, and similarly considered Critically Imperiled by NatureServe.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Condors begin to look for a mate when they reach sexual maturity at the age of 6. To attract a prospective mate, the male condor performs a display, in that the male turns his head red and puffs out his neck feathers.
The pair makes a simple nest in caves or on cliff clefts, especially ones with nearby roosting trees and open spaces for landing. A mated female lays one bluish-white egg every other year.
In crisis
It became extinct in the wild in 1987 when all remaining wild individuals were captured, but has since been reintroduced to northern Arizona and southern Utah (among them the Grand Canyon area and Zion National Park), the coastal mountains of California, and northern Baja California in Mexico. A conservation plan put in place by the United States government led to the capture of all the remaining wild condors by 1987, with a total population of 27 individuals. In December 2025, the Fish and Wildlife Service updated the world population to 607.
The capture of the remaining wild condors was completed on Easter Sunday 1987, when AC-9, the last wild condor, was captured. The goal of the California Condor Recovery Plan was to establish two geographically separate populations, one in California and the other in Arizona, each with 150 birds and at least 15 breeding pairs.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
California condor is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on California condor, Wikidata item Q194314. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
