Condor Found, Colorado Bound

It’s not every day that you stumble across an endangered California Condor—but then again, it’s not every day that you lose one of these massive birds either.

In February, officials from Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona listed one of their resident condors, a 2-year-old male known as “N8,” as “missing and feared dead.” Condors continue to be threatened by lead poisoning and hunting—problems that almost decimated the entire population in the ’80s. Wildlife officials thought N8 might have met the same tragic fate.

But then Franz Carver, a park ranger with Mesa Verde National Park, photographed a bird he thought was a Turkey Vulture near the town of Dolores, Colorado, only to realize after downloading the images that the bird had a distinctive mark: an N8 tag from the San Diego Wild Animal Park, where it was bred. He quickly informed the Grand Canyon National Park Service that their lost/deceased condor was in fact, alive and well.

“It was pretty exciting to hear he made it over to Colorado,” Janice Stroud-Settles, a biologist from Grand Canyon National Park, said to the Cortez Journal. “We’ve heard reports of our birds in Colorado before, but we have never had photographic proof.”

N8 was then photographed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by a resident who noticed the drifter lounging in his backyard. It’s the first time a condor has been recorded in the state, Bob Parmenter, a scientist from the Valles Caldera National Preserve, told the Associated Press.

Wild condors are typically only found in California, Utah, and Arizona. The fact that this individual was spotted outside of those states could mean that the species is bouncing back to parts of its historic range. Just 20 years ago, California Condor numbers were at an all-time low; but a captive breeding program carefully coaxed the population back into the hundreds. Now there are over 400 of these birds in North America, half of which were born and raised in the wild. Some might go on to wander, and maybe even get a little lost, like N8.

Read more about the efforts to revitalize this iconic species here.

Correction: The article previously misstated that Mesa Verde National Park is in Nevada. It's in Colorado.