Justin Brown

On 19 April 1987, biologists closed a trap on a single adult condor at Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in Kern County, California. The bird, known to the recovery program as AC-9, was the last California condor flying free anywhere on Earth. With his capture, the entire species, all 27 individuals, lived behind fences at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo, as the

In 1998, thirty-one Przewalski's horses were unloaded inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and turned out into abandoned farmland, a stocky, upright-maned, dun-colored species that had not existed in the wild anywhere on Earth for roughly three decades. Twenty years later, a local census put the population at about 150 animals on the Ukrainian side of the zone, close to five times the founding herd, according to

Between 1999 and 2006, crews working across California's Channel Islands captured and relocated 44 golden eagles. Between 2005 and 2006, contractors removed more than 5,000 feral pigs from Santa Cruz Island. On that island, the native fox population had fallen to 55 animals. By the 2024 monitoring season, land managers counted 3,086.

Forty-one wild wolves went into Yellowstone National Park in three winters, and in the winter before the first crate opened the park held none. Predator control that ran into the 1920s had emptied the place; the National Park Service ended its wolf killing program in 1926 with no packs left to protect. Thirty-one years after the last releases, the

Fifteen foxes. That was the count on San Miguel Island at the end of the 1990s, on an island that had carried about 450 of them, a population so small that biologists could have known every animal by name and very nearly did. In 2024, field crews trapping and collaring across the same windswept ground tallied roughly 322, according to the

A spacecraft that weighed 721.9 kilograms — 1,592 pounds, roughly the mass of a small car — lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 5, 1977, at 12:56:01 UT.

Forty-one wolves rode into Yellowstone National Park in crates over three winters. Fourteen came from Alberta in 1995, seventeen from British Columbia in 1996, and ten from northwestern Montana in 1997. Thirty-one winters later, the

In 2002, field teams could account for 94 Iberian lynxes on the entire planet, and every one of them lived in Andalusia: 54 in the scrub and holm

A New Zealand parrot nearly extinct three decades ago has staged an improbable resurrection—but the rarest bird in the world remains one bad season away from catastrophe.

Japan's most infamous mercury disaster left behind a permanent landfill—and an uneasy question about what happens when the cap eventually fails.