The ghost bird officially is extinct.
A video in 2005 suggesting the ivory-billed woodpecker was in a swamp in Arkansas inspired legions of bird-enthusiasts to believe.
We hoped for a comeback story but there is no comeback for America’s largest woodpecker and 22 other species declared extinct in late September by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The FWS, in a notice Sept. 29, said, “Based on rigorous reviews of the best available science for each of these species, the service has determined these species are extinct and thus no longer require listing under the ESA.
“The purpose of the ESA is to protect and recover imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend. For the species proposed for delisting today, the protections of the ESA came too late.”
Eight species of freshwater mussels once found in healthy streams and rivers in the Southeast also are gone, as is the San Marcos gambusia, a freshwater fish once found in Texas, the Scioto madtom fish once found in Ohio and 11 species once found in Hawai’i and the Pacific Islands.
The Bachman’s warbler that flew over Florida during its migration is gone.
And the ivory-billed woodpecker that once thrived in Florida is gone.
Some people might shrug off the news. After all, multiple generations grew up without knowing of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
To those people, I’d say, “Imagine if the Florida manatee was declared extinct, the Florida panther, the American alligator, the loggerhead sea turtle, the monarch butterfly, even the honeybee.”
The demise of the ivory-billed woodpecker tells us such extinctions really could happen, that the animals we see nesting on the beach, swimming in the Gulf, flying overhead might be gone someday.
The ivory-billed was listed as endangered in 1967 but the last commonly agreed upon sighting was in April 1944 on the Singer Tract in northeast Louisiana.
Deforestation and development destroyed the bird’s habitat but still, people hoped, listened and looked for the species throughout the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st.
The survey efforts here and in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama resulted in rumored sightings, blurry video, and misidentification.
In the days when ivory-billed swooped down from a long-leaf pine to awe onlookers, the woodpecker was known as the “Lord God bird.”
It became the “ghost bird” after it went missing from North America.
And now it’s a “gone bird.”
There’s a hard lesson for the dreamers and the developers in the declared demise of the ivory-billed woodpecker: Human activity can drive species to decline and extinction. Efforts to conserve species before their declines become irreversible are vital.