It’s easy to get lost in the dread of current events, but there are always success stories that point to hope. While climate change and human expansion still pose a major threat to several animals across the globe, attentive care has helped several escape extinction in just the last century.
From majestic birds of prey to massive ocean-dwellers, these are just a few of those triumphs. Let’s explore 6 animals that escaped extinction!
1. California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus)
California Condors are incredible birds to behold. With a wingspan over 9 feet, they’re one of the world’s largest birds and the largest land bird in North America. While they used to fly the skies from the southwestern United States into northwestern Mexico, their incredibly small population is now limited to parts of California.
In the late 20th century, California Condors really started to struggle with issues like synthetic pesticide use (primarily DDT), poaching, and habitat loss. By 1987, there were only 27 known remaining California Condors, all in captivity, and they were declared extinct in the wild.
The United States government began one of the most expensive conservation projects in their history, spending over $35 million with annual upkeep costs around $2 million. The results were slow, but they offered plenty of hope to keep the population on the rise.
The Ventana Wildlife Society now notes that there are 565 total California Condors, with 268 in the wild and 197 in captivity. Those introduced to the wild are still tagged and closely monitored, and the IUCN Red List has them listed as “Critically Endangered”.
2. Island Fox (Urocyon littoralis)
Island foxes only live on six of the eight Channel Islands. When the Bald Eagle population started to drop in the latter half of the 20th century, Golden Eagle were more than ready to take over their hunting grounds off the California coast, and island foxes became one of their favorite snacks.
These foxes already had low genetic variation before their numbers were depleted, and they remained on the endangered species list from 2004 to 2016. By 2018, populations had increased in some areas by nearly 2000 percent, all thanks to breeding and recovery programs in conjunction with the removal of Golden Eagles in the area.
3. Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca)
Giant pandas are strange creatures with easygoing appearances, so it’s difficult to remember they nearly went extinct in the late 20th century. Habitat loss and poaching decimated their numbers, leaving only 1,000 left in the wild by the 1970s.
Giant pandas are picky eaters, and they don’t reproduce often. They pretty much only eat bamboo, so having their forests cleared for development projects doesn’t leave them with much. Combined with their short breeding season and short fertile window, even the most scrutinous breeding programs ran into issues.
Still, strict oversight by the Chinese government and dedicated reserves have brought the number of wild pandas to around 3,000. They’re still listed as a vulnerable species, but there is plenty of hope and awareness.
4. Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
Similar to the California Condor, the blue whale’s incredible size didn’t give it any advantage on maintaining population. As technology advanced rapidly in the twentieth century, hunting whales became easier and the drive for whale meat and oil nearly destroyed the entire species.
Between 1900 and 1970, whalers dropped an estimated population of 380,000 to about 760 – just 0.2 percent of what the turn of the century had seen. Protection efforts began in 1939, but it wasn’t until 1966 that the International Convention for Regulation of Whaling was founded, and changes were made across the globe.
It’s been a slow climb upward for the blue whale, but in 2018 the estimated population reached about 10,000.
5. Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus)
The Peregrine falcon is known for a lot of things. They’re the fastest animal in the world, reaching speeds over 320 kilometers per hour when dive bombing. They’re also the most famous bird of prey affected by dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, more commonly known as DDT.
In the late 1970s, researchers pointed out that the synthetic pesticide had serious negative effects on the environment. Birds of prey in particular dealt with an accumulation of the chemical as it worked through the food chain. This caused a number of issues, the worst of which was the thinning of egg shells.
After DDT was banned in 1972, the Peregrine falcon population started to increase. Combined with other efforts, like captive breeding programs and large-scale protection of their nesting places, Peregrine falcons are no longer on the Endangered Species list.
6. American Bison (Bison bison)
The American Bison (not a true Buffalo) has a long history in North America, with the last few centuries being its bloodiest. The “Bison Belt” reaches from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, with evidence that they’ve been on the land since 9000 BC.
Records show their population of around 60 million in the late 1700s was nearly decimated just a century later. As settlers pushed westward in the 19th century, the U.S. Army introduced a campaign to vanquish the existing Indigenous populations. They incentivized the killing of bison, the main source of food, materials, and spiritual connection for Native Americans, and the population dropped to just 541 by 1889.
Recovery efforts have had a steep climb to get where they are today, with about 500,000 living bison in the United States and Canada, with the majority on private land as livestock and about 31,000 in the wild. This is thanks in large part to indigenous efforts like that of the Intertribal Buffalo Council and preservation of grassland ecosystems.
