Yurok condor becomes first to fly free in Oregon in 100 years

A 2-year-old female condor raised in Orick crossed into southern Oregon and became the first California condor known to fly free in Oregon in more than a century, a sign that the Yurok Tribe’s restoration program is now pushing the species back across a much wider northern landscape.

The bird, B9, left Humboldt County on May 12 and spent four days moving north into the Medford area before turning back south. By the time she returned to the Yurok Tribe’s facility on May 16, she had covered about 380 miles, including roughly 80 miles through southern Oregon. For a species that once vanished from the region, the trip marked more than a rare sighting. It showed a restored condor population ranging on its own across territory that was once part of the bird’s historic flight path.

The California condor is the largest land bird in North America, with a wingspan of about 9.5 feet and a weight of up to 25 pounds. It nearly disappeared altogether. By 1982, only 23 survived worldwide, and by 1987 all remaining wild condors had been brought into captive breeding. Since 1992, the federal recovery program and its partners have grown the total free-flying and captive population to more than 500 birds, but the species still faces one of its biggest threats in the wild: lead poisoning from spent ammunition.

The Yurok Tribe began its condor restoration effort in 2003, when elders made prey-go-neesh a top priority for return to Yurok ancestral territory. The tribe created its Wildlife Program in 2008 with condor reintroduction as a principal focus, and the first free-flying condors returned to Redwood National and State Parks on May 3, 2022. Today, the tribe reports 24 condors living in the wild within Yurok ancestral territory, and in March 2026 it said condors A0 and A1 may have begun incubating the first known Pacific Northwest condor egg in more than 100 years in the Redwood Creek drainage.

B9’s flight mattered because it landed in a broader recovery framework, not as an isolated wander. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has set a recovery goal of two geographically distinct wild populations of 150 birds each, plus a captive population, and the Pacific Northwest nonessential experimental population area includes northern California, northwest Nevada and Oregon. For Humboldt County, the Oregon crossing showed that the condor program rooted in Orick is no longer only bringing birds back to redwood country. It is helping rebuild a species across the wider Pacific Northwest, one flight at a time.