Bringing the Condors Home

This exhibit highlights North America’s largest bird, the California condor, telling the story of its brush with extinction, and of the determined people who are fighting to save this remarkable bird.

For millennia, the California condor sailed the skies of the Pacific Coast. By the mid-1980s, however, the condor was dangerously close to extinction, with only 22 individuals left alive. Determined not to allow this magnificent bird to die out, dedicated biologists, individuals and organizations captured the last birds living in the wild and began a captive breeding and reintroduction program. Thanks to their dedication, today there are over 300 condors, with about half living in the wild.

Visitors can walk into a 360-degree panorama of condor country, test their condor knowledge in a computer game, measure themselves against a condor’s ten-foot wingspan, and see a real stuffed condor, collected in Monterey in 1885 and on loan from the Smithsonian.

The exhibit was developed by the Ventana Wildlife Society, a leader in the fight to save the condor.