The ivory-billed woodpecker and 22 other bird and fish species were recently declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
John W. Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said the extinction of the bird was due in large part to deforestation.
“The fact that this bird is so critically endangered has been true since the 1890s, and it’s fundamentally a consequence of the fact that we cut down every last trace of the virgin forest of the southeastern U.S. We took all that away,” Fitzpatrick told the Washington Post.
The bird had been the largest of the woodpeckers north of Mexico, along with the third biggest in the world and the elimination of its natural habitat of old-growth forests throughout the southeastern United States to Cuba was the major contributor to its demise.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology was involved in efforts to relocate ivory-billed woodpeckers in the southeastern U.S. after reported sightings of the bird in Arkansas in 2004.
Another of the animals is the flat pigtoe, a freshwater mussel in the southeastern U.S. that was only identified as scientists discovered the species was entering extinction.
Anthony “Andy” Ford, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Tennessee who specializes in freshwater mussels said that the notion of seeing these animals in person was not lost on him.
“When I see one of those really rare ones, it’s always in the back of my mind that I might be the last one to see this animal again,” Ford said.
The 23 species had been on the endangered species list since the 1960s with the case for extinction linked to overdevelopment, water pollution, logging, competition from invasive species and over-hunting.
