The ivory-billed woodpecker is gone. Others could be next

birders may persist, but the Holy Grail bird — the ivorybilled woodpecker — is, like the passenger pigeon or the Great Auk, a gone bird.

Last month, the US. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it was no longer listing the ivorybilled woodpecker — last seen for sure in Louisiana in 1944 — as an endangered species because it considers the bird extinct.

“It’s about time,” said

Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, who has been skeptical about recent ivory-billed sightings. “There’s some romance and some sorrow here. But we need more realism and less faith.”

The Great God bird — so called because that’s what people said when they saw the crow-sized woodpecker of the southern woods and hardwood swamps — isn’t the only species the fish and wildlife service demoted from endangered to extinct.

In all, it proposed dropping 23 species — including nine birds, eight freshwater mussels, one bat, one fish and one plant — into extinction because decades of field work shows they’re no longer on this planet.

One of the birds — Bachman’s warbler, last seen in South Carolina in 1962 and in Cuba in 1981 — has long been considered extinct. The Fish and Wildlife Service is now considering whether to drop another bird — the Eskimo

curlew, last seen in Barbados in 1963 — to the same status.

Among the species the fish and wildlife service delisted, the ivory-billed woodpecker is a special case. Although it was last identified 77 years ago, people persist in insisting they’ve seen one.

In 2005, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology announced, with trumpets, that it had vidQuesting eo of an ivory-billed woodpecker taken in 2004 in the Big Woods region of Arkansas.

The video became the Zapruder film of birding — what do the wing beats really show? — and sent some of the world’s best birders to Arkansas in search of the ivorybilled to no avail. There’s been no confirmed sightings or even wildlife cam shots.

The fish and wildlife’s announcement — which will become official in 60 days, giving the Sir Galahads among field biologists time to ask for a little more time — is a reason to pause and mourn. None of us has seen Bachman’s warbler or the Little Mariana fruit bat of Guam — the bat on the list — but they were once living things.

“It’s disappeared,” said Jenny Dickson, director of the wildlife division of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “It’s something that’s ended, that’s out of our lives.”

“The sobering thought was ‘Not enough was done when we could do it,’” said Yale’s Prum.

And it comes with a warning. There may be more species added to the list unless humans step in to reverse the desecration they’ve caused.

Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, can easily list some of the birds that are of immediate concern in the state — saltmarsh sparrow, wood thrush, red knot, roseate tern, black rail, cerulean warbler.

The long term may be grimmer.

“There are three billion fewer birds than there were in 1970,” Comins said.

Adding climate change to habitat loss and despoilment only makes things more difficult. Sometimes, even the human presence hurts things.

Comins gives the semipalmated sandpiper as an example. These birds are long-distance migrators, flying from the far north of Alaska and Canada to the northeast coast of South America in the fall, then back in the spring.

When they pass through Connecticut, they need time to roost, rest and fatten up before the next long leg of their trips. People strolling the beach and admiring the sandpiper flocks — scattering them in the process — may prevent the birds from getting in good trim to head off again.

“These places are in heavy demand for recreation,” Comins said

“It may mean we even have to rethink the use of our nature preserves,” Prum said.

Dickson said the delisting of the 23 species is also a convincing argument for the U.S. Congress to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which will dedicate $1.3 billion a year for wildlife conservation. Connecticut would get about $12 million a year from the funding.

Dickson said that money will allow the state to get a much better idea of what’s happening in its ecosystems and how best to protect them. Doing that could, in turn, bring back endangered species. Holy Grail searches won’t be needed.

“People think ‘Maybe we can do this later,’’’ Dickson said. “Now is the time.”