22 animals, 1 plant may now be extinct, US says
Wildlife officials to hear from public before final ruling
The ivory-billed woodpecker, which birders have been seeking in the bayous of Arkansas, is gone forever, according to federal officials.
So is the Bachman’s warbler, a yellow-breasted songbird that once migrated between the Southeastern United States and Cuba.
The song of the Kauai O’o, a Hawaiian forest bird, exists only on recordings.
And there is no longer any hope for several types of freshwater mussels that once filtered streams and rivers from Georgia to Illinois.
In all, 22 animals and one plant should be declared extinct and removed from the endangered species list, federal wildlife officials announced Wednesday.
The announcement could also offer a glimpse of the future.
It comes amid a worsening global biodiversity crisis that threatens 1 million species with extinction, many within decades. Human activities like farming, logging, mining and damming take habitat from animals and pollute much of what’s left. People poach and overfish. Climate change adds new peril.
“Each of these 23 species represents a permanent loss to our nation’s natural heritage and to global biodiversity,” said Bridget Fahey, who oversees species classification for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The extinctions include 11 birds, eight freshwater mussels, two fish, a bat and a plant. Many of them were likely extinct, or almost so, by the time the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, officials and advocates said.
“The Endangered Species Act wasn’t passed in time to save most of these species,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit group. “It’s a tragedy.”
Since the passage of the act, 54 species in the U.S. have been removed from the endangered list because their populations recovered, while another 48 have improved enough to move from endangered to threatened. Eleven listed species have been declared extinct.
A 60-day public comment period on the new batch of 23 begins Thursday. Scientists and members of the public can provide information they would like the Fish and Wildlife Service to consider before making a final ruling.
Scientists do not declare extinctions lightly. It often takes decades of fruitless searching. About half of the species in this group were already considered extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global authority on the status of animals and plants. The Fish and Wildlife Service moved slower in part because it is working through a backlog, officials said, and tends to prioritize providing protection for species that need it over removing protection for those that don’t.
Many of the final confirmed sightings were in the 1980s, though one Hawaiian bird was last documented in 2004.
No animal in the batch has been sought more passionately than the ivory-bill, the largest woodpecker in the United States. Once inhabiting old growth forests and swamps of the Southeast, the birds declined as European settlers and their descendants cleared forests and hunted them. The last confirmed sighting was in Louisiana in 1944.
But in 2004, a kayaker named Gene Sparling set off a flurry of searching when he saw a woodpecker that looked like an ivory-bill in an Arkansas swamp. Days after hearing about it, two experienced birders, Tim Gallagher and Bobby Harrison, flew in to join him on a search. On Day 2, paddling in their kayaks, they were getting ready to stop for lunch when a big bird flew right in front of them. “Tim and I both yelled ‘Ivory-bill!’ at the same time,” Harrison recalled.
In doing so, they scared the bird away.
A host of Cornell University ornithologists, several more searches, a few reported sightings and a blurry video later, a 2005 paper in the journal Science declared “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America.”
Controversy ensued. Some experts argued that the footage was of pileated woodpeckers. Repeated attempts by state and federal wildlife agencies to find the bird have been unsuccessful, and many experts have concluded that it is extinct.
When Amy Trahan, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, completed the most recent species
assessment for the woodpecker, she said, she had to make her recommendation based on the best available science. At the end of the report, she checked a line next to the words “delist based on extinction.”
“That was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in my career,” she said. “I literally cried.”