12 American Animals That Came Back, and the Bald Eagle’s Jump From 417 Nesting Pairs

By 1982, only 22 California condors were left. On April 19, 1987, biologists caught the last wild one, and every condor on Earth, 27 birds, lived in a breeding program. Captive-bred condors went back into the wild in California starting in January 1992.

At the end of 2025, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counted 607 California condors, and 392 of them were flying free in California, Arizona and Utah, the Pacific Northwest and Mexico’s Baja California. Sixteen chicks fledged in the wild that year.

In 1941, only 15 whooping cranes spent the winter at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas coast. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, every whooping crane alive today comes from those 15 birds.

In June 2026, the agency estimated that about 540 whooping cranes wintered there in 2025–2026, including at least 57 young birds. The flock has now been estimated at more than 500 for over nine winters in a row.

The island fox lives only on California’s Channel Islands and is about the size of a house cat. By 2000, the National Park Service says, the foxes on San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands were down to 15 each.

In August 2016, three subspecies came off the endangered list in what federal officials called the fastest recovery of any mammal listed under the Endangered Species Act. By then, San Miguel had about 700 foxes, Santa Rosa about 1,200 and Santa Cruz about 2,100.

In 1963, there were only 417 known nesting pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 states. The national bird was close to vanishing from most of the country.

In March 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported more than 71,400 nesting pairs and about 316,700 bald eagles in the lower 48, four times as many birds as in 2009. The agency credits decades of protection, the ban on the pesticide DDT and conservation work with many partners.

Black-footed ferrets were thought to be extinct in the 1970s until a small population turned up in 1981. Every black-footed ferret alive today, except the clones, descends from the last seven wild ones.

Antonia was born in 2023 from tissue taken in 1988 from a ferret named Willa. In 2024, she had kits of her own. In 2025, Antonia and her offspring produced three more litters at the Smithsonian’s conservation campus in Virginia, bringing back genes the species had lost. The photo shows two young ferrets at a federal breeding center, not Antonia’s family.

In 1965, sea otters were moved from Amchitka Island in the Aleutians to the outer coast of southeast Alaska. A few reached the mouth of Glacier Bay in the early 1990s, and then they spread fast.

By 2012, the National Park Service estimated more than 8,000 sea otters in Glacier Bay, an average growth of 42% a year. On July 21, 2016, researchers counted a single group of more than 500 near Point Gustavus. Otters eat sea urchins, and fewer urchins means more room for kelp forests to grow.

Yellowstone is the only place in the United States where bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times. By 1902, the park’s herd was down to about two dozen animals, so the Army brought in 21 more bison from two private herds.

The park’s 2025 estimate, made before the calves were born, was nearly 5,300 bison, the largest bison population on public land in the country.

The nēnē, or Hawaiian goose, is Hawaii’s state bird. In 1950, fewer than 30 were estimated to live in the wild, all on Hawaiʻi Island.

The 2022 survey counted 3,862 nēnē across the state, 2,430 of them on Kauaʻi. In 2019, when there were about 3,252, the species was moved from endangered to threatened.

By the 1960s, the pesticide DDT had wiped out peregrine falcons in the eastern United States. After DDT was banned, The Peregrine Fund and its partners bred the falcons and released more than 4,000 young birds.

In 1999, the peregrine came off the U.S. endangered species list. Today many pairs nest on the ledges of tall buildings and bridges in cities, and in a hunting dive a peregrine can top 200 mph.

The brown pelican is Louisiana’s state bird. By the 1960s, pesticide residues meant pelicans in Louisiana could not raise any young at all, and Texas recorded only two nests in 1968.

Between 1968 and 1980, Louisiana’s wildlife department brought the birds back using pelicans from colonies in Florida. Successful nests climbed to 16,405 in 2001 and peaked at 16,501 in 2004, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service review.

Kirtland’s warbler is a small songbird that nests in jack pine forests, mostly in northern Michigan, and spends the winter in the Bahamas. Its count hit record lows of 167 singing males in 1974 and again in 1987.

Planting new jack pine habitat helped turn it around. The population reached a record 2,383 singing males in 2015, the year of the last full census, and the warbler came off the endangered list on Nov. 8, 2019.

The sihek, or Guam kingfisher, comes from the forests of Guam, a U.S. island in the western Pacific. It has been extinct in the wild since 1988 and survived only in zoos.

In September 2024, nine zoo-raised birds, four females and five males, were released on Cooper Island at Palmyra Atoll, a protected reserve in the Pacific. They became the first sihek in the wild in almost 40 years. The plan is to bring them home to Guam one day.