The ivory-billed woodpecker has officially been declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, alongside 22 other species.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials choked up when declaring that the decades-long effort to save the woodpecker had ended, as none of the birds can be found in the wild, according to The Washington Post.
“This is not an easy thing,” Amy Trahan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who reviewed the evidence and wrote the report concluding the extinction, said. “Nobody wants to be a part of that. Just having to write those words was quite difficult. It took me a while.”
Before the declaration becomes final, there will be a three-month comment period to verify the final status change of the ivory-billed woodpecker and the 22 other bird, fish and species declared extinct, according to PBS.
“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," John W. Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, told The Washington Post.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was the largest woodpecker north of Mexico and the third largest in the world. Destruction of its habitat of old-growth forests from the southeastern U.S. to Cuba was the major contributor to its extinction, All About Birds states.
