12 Endangered Animals That Came Back, Like a Parrot With 90 Chicks in One Season

The kākāpō is a heavy, flightless parrot found only in New Zealand. When the country’s Department of Conservation started its recovery program in 1995, there were just 51 birds left, and only 20 of them were female.

On Sept. 1, 2026, DOC officially added 90 chicks from this year’s breeding season, bringing the population to 325, the highest since the program began. In the early years, it took 16 years to raise that many chicks. DOC thinks the last time there were more than 300 kākāpō may have been about 75 years ago.

In 2002, fewer than 100 Iberian lynxes were counted in the wild. A breeding program, protected habitat and releases into the wild, which began in 2011, turned that around.

In June 2026, Spain’s environment ministry reported that the 2025 census counted 2,663 lynxes, a new record: 2,269 in Spain and 394 in Portugal. That is 10.9% more than a year earlier, and the number of breeding females reached 542.

In the 19th century, fewer than 1,000 giant tortoises were left on Aldabra, a remote coral atoll in Seychelles. The atoll became a strict nature reserve in 1981 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982.

In October 2026, a survey led by the Seychelles Islands Foundation and the University of Exeter estimated about 180,000 tortoises there, far more than the human population of the whole country. It is the highest figure ever recorded for the species and the first update since a count of 100,000 in the late 1990s. The photo shows Aldabra giant tortoises on Curieuse, another island in Seychelles.

Rats reached Lord Howe Island, off the east coast of Australia, in 1918, and by 1920 its giant stick insect was gone. For 80 years, people thought it was extinct.

In 2001, scientists climbed Ball’s Pyramid, an 1,800-foot sea stack about 12 miles from the island, and found the entire population, 24 insects, on a single bush. A few went to Melbourne Zoo, which by 2014 had around 1,000 adults and 20,000 eggs. The insect is not back on Lord Howe yet. In February 2026, a monitoring team found it at two spots on Ball’s Pyramid, and the island has started asking residents about bringing it home.

On Oct. 10, 2025, the IUCN Red List moved the green sea turtle from Endangered to Least Concern. The global population has grown by about 28% since the 1970s.

The IUCN credits decades of work: guarding nesting females and their eggs on beaches, community programs that cut the harvest of turtles and eggs, limits on trade and escape hatches in fishing nets. Programs on Ascension Island and in Brazil, Mexico and Hawaii worked especially well. Green turtles are still far less common than they once were, and some regional groups are still under pressure.

Española, one of the Galápagos Islands, once had only 15 giant tortoises left, and the survivors went into a breeding program. One of the males, Diego, had spent decades at the San Diego Zoo and came back to the Galápagos in 1977 to join them.

When the Galápagos National Park ended the 40-year program in January 2020, more than 2,000 tortoises had been returned to Española. The park said about 40% of them are Diego’s descendants. He was more than 100 years old at the time.

The scimitar-horned oryx, a desert antelope with long curved horns, disappeared from the wild and survived only in captivity. A long international project brought it back to the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim reserve in Chad.

In December 2023, the IUCN moved it from Extinct in the Wild to Endangered. At least 140 adults now roam free there, and 331 calves had been born in the wild by 2021. An IUCN expert called it only the fourth large mammal in 100 years to be returned to the wild successfully. The photo shows oryx at a reintroduction site in Tunisia.

By the 1920s, Europe’s bison were gone from the wild. Only 54 animals were left in European zoos, and the last wild one disappeared in the Caucasus in 1927.

In 1954, the first bison were released back into Poland’s Białowieża Forest, and more herds followed in other countries. An IUCN-backed report counted about 6,800 wild bison in more than 40 free-ranging herds across 10 European countries. The bull in the photo lives in Białowieża.

The saiga is an antelope of the Central Asian steppe with an oversized, trunk-like nose. About 98% of all saigas live in Kazakhstan.

In December 2023, the IUCN moved the saiga from Critically Endangered to Near Threatened. Kazakhstan’s herds grew by 1,100% between 2015 and 2022 and reached 1.3 million animals in May 2022. The IUCN credits years of protection, education programs and training for border and customs officers.

In 2008, mountain gorillas were estimated at 680. They live only in the mountain forests where Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo meet. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund says they are protected by more than 20 times the global average of field staff per square kilometer.

Their numbers passed 1,000, and in November 2018 the IUCN moved them from Critically Endangered to Endangered. Mongabay noted it is the only great ape other than humans whose numbers are growing.

The takahē is a large, flightless blue and green bird from New Zealand. It was presumed extinct for nearly 50 years until 1948, when Geoffrey Orbell, a doctor from Invercargill, and his party found the last wild birds in the tussock grasslands of Fiordland’s Murchison Mountains.

That find started New Zealand’s longest-running endangered species program. By October 2023 there were around 500 takahē, and that year birds were released in the Upper Whakatipu valley to start a second wild population.

Whaling that began around 1830 cut the humpback whales of the western South Atlantic, the population that spends the winter off Brazil, to about 440 animals by 1958.

A 2019 study in Royal Society Open Science estimated that about 25,000 now live there, roughly 93% of the 27,000 that existed before the hunting began. Earlier estimates had put the recovery at only about 30%. The photo shows a tour boat beside a humpback off Arraial do Cabo, near Rio de Janeiro.