In 2021, the federal government did something it had never done before. It gave a wind energy company legal permission to kill California condors the most expensively rescued bird in American history, a species that had been down to 22 individuals on the entire planet in 1982.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service authorized Avangrid Renewables’ Manzana Wind Power Project near Rosamond, California, to accidentally kill up to two free flying adult condors and two of their eggs or chicks, spread out over the following 30 years.
On paper, it reads like a step backward for a bird that took four decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring back from the edge of extinction.
What actually happened is the opposite of what the permit implies. Three years after it was issued, Avangrid had not killed a single condor. Instead, the mitigation money it was required to pay upfront regardless of whether any bird ever died had already helped raise twelve new condors for release into the wild, double what the permit required.
The company effectively paid its debt to the species before the debt came due, using a machine of trackers, geofences, and remote power switches built specifically to make sure the “take” it was licensed to cause never actually happens.
A bird almost too rare to kill
To understand why anyone would grant a company permission to kill an endangered species, it helps to understand how close that species came to disappearing altogether. The California condor is North America’s largest land bird, with a wingspan of about 9.5 feet nearly the width of a one car garage door. It can glide for hours on rising air currents without flapping, covering enormous distances in a single day while scanning the ground for carrion.
By 1982, decades of shooting, poisoning, and lead ammunition fragments in the carcasses condors fed on had reduced the entire world population to just 22 birds. Wildlife managers made the drastic call to trap every remaining wild condor and start a captive breeding program from scratch. It worked, slowly. Today the population has climbed back to more than 500 birds, with a little over half of them flying free.
That recovery is precisely what created the collision course with wind power. As the condor population expanded northward out of Southern California, it began overlapping with the Tehachapi Wind Resource Area, the largest concentration of wind turbines in the state thousands of spinning blades sitting squarely inside the birds’ expanding range. Regulators and energy companies needed a way to let both things exist at once.
The permit nobody wanted to use
The Manzana Wind Power Project consists of 126 turbines strung across the Tehachapi foothills in Kern County, generating enough electricity to power roughly 100,000 households. It began operating in 2012. By 2017 and 2018, biologists were watching condors land and perch within a mile and a quarter of the turbines close enough that a mistimed flight path could end in a collision.
Rather than wait for a bird to die and then face legal exposure under the Endangered Species Act, Avangrid worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Palm Springs office to apply for what’s called an incidental take permit a mechanism that lets a company legally cause a small, pre-calculated amount of harm to a protected species, in exchange for committing to prevention measures and compensating conservation work.
The process took years of population modeling to determine exactly how much harm the condor population could absorb without slowing its recovery. The answer, finalized in 2021, was two adult birds and two eggs or chicks, over three decades a number deliberately set low enough that the population viability analysis showed no real risk to the species’ rebound.
How you stop a bird you can’t see coming
The permit’s real substance isn’t the two deaths it allows it’s the system built to prevent them. Roughly 81 percent of Southern California’s condor population wears a GPS tag, fitted by wildlife biologists as part of ongoing monitoring.
Avangrid used that existing infrastructure to draw a virtual boundary, a geofence, around the wind farm. The moment a tagged condor’s signal crosses that line, the company can power down, or “curtail,” the turbines in the bird’s path, letting it glide through a field of stationary blades instead of spinning ones.
A trained human observer covers the gap the technology leaves the roughly one-fifth of the population that isn’t tagged. And because condors are drawn to dead livestock, the company also runs a carcass-removal program to keep the birds from being lured toward the turbines in the first place.
In one recent year, the entire system’s biggest event was a single dead sheep, spotted and hauled away before any condor arrived to feed on it. Keeping this apparatus running for the full 30-year term of the permit is projected to cost Avangrid $8.5 million.
So far, it has worked completely. As of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent public accounting, there are no reports of a condor being killed at Manzana, or at any other wind project in the country.
Paying the debt before it’s owed
The stranger piece of the arrangement is the money Avangrid was required to spend independent of whether the geofence ever failed. The mitigation plan obligated the company to fund a full-time condor keeper position at the Oregon Zoo’s Jonsson Center for Wildlife Conservation, a 52-acre breeding facility outside Portland, at a cost of just over $500,000 over five years.
The job’s mandate was to help produce six additional condors for release into the wild a number set, again, by population modeling, meant to fully offset the permitted loss of two adult birds regardless of the actual mechanics of how a condor is worth more or less than an egg.
This flips the usual order of environmental compensation. Normally a company pays to repair damage after it happens. Here, Avangrid paid to create new condors before any were lost, on the theory that six extra birds released into the wild more than balances two that might eventually be taken. It’s compensation scheduled in advance, priced out like an insurance premium, and payable whether or not a claim is ever filed.
The funded position outperformed its own target. Between 2022 and 2024, the Oregon Zoo’s breeding program used Avangrid’s funding to contribute to rearing twelve condors ten released in 2022 and 2023, with two more juveniles expected to reach releasable age.
That’s double the six the permit required, all produced without a single condor death to compensate for. Because the take never happened, those extra birds count as pure conservation gain layered on top of a permit that, so far, has cost the species nothing.
What happens after the debt is paid
Once Avangrid met its funding obligation, it didn’t wind the arrangement down it handed it off. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power took over funding the same Oregon Zoo position for another three years, as its own form of mitigation tied to a separate incidental take permit issued in 2023 for its Pine Tree Wind Farm, elsewhere in the same wind resource area.
The model built for Manzana has since become a template: in 2023, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued a similar permit to a coalition of 24 wind energy companies operating across the broader Tehachapi region, aiming to apply the same geofence-and-breeding formula at a much larger scale.
None of this guarantees a condor will never die at a wind turbine. The permit exists precisely because regulators accept that, over 30 years of operation near an expanding condor population, a strike is possible even with every precaution in place.
But four years into that 30-year window, the system built to make the permit unnecessary is the part actually doing the work and the birds it was designed to compensate for are already flying free, ahead of schedule, having never been lost in the first place.