In 1987, the California condor vanished from the wild, leaving just 27 birds confined to zoos. But the hidden killer was never habitat loss.
The California condor is the largest flying land bird in North America, with a wingspan of about nine and a half feet and a weight of roughly 25 pounds. It can cover 150 miles in a day by riding columns of warm air, sometimes reaching heights of 15,000 feet without flapping. The species has existed for tens of thousands of years, and its role in cleaning carcasses from the landscape made it a vita…
California found just 15 foxes left on one island, teetering on the brink of total extinction. Wildlife rescuers scrambled to save the species from disappearing forever, launching an urgent breeding program in the remote wilderness.
In 1994, approximately 450 island foxes lived on San Miguel Island off the California coast. Five years later, only 15 remained. Graduate student Gary Roemer began finding fox carcasses on neighboring Santa Cruz Island during his research there. Over two years, he found 21 dead foxes, 19 of them with similar wounds indicating predation from above.The island fox, about the size of a house cat, live…
Spain just returned its final 62 captive-bred lynx to the wild, aiming to rescue a species once pushed to the brink. Conservationists hoped these carefully raised cats would finally establish themselves in territories where they had vanished entirely.
The Iberian lynx came close to disappearing entirely between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. Two disease outbreaks had devastated its primary food source, the European rabbit, across most of the Iberian Peninsula. By 2001, the lynx population had fallen to 62 mature adults, with 25 breeding females, confined to two isolated areas in southern Spain.For more than a million years, the lynx had se…