Story at a glance:
- There are 12 new entries in the extinct list, including the ivory-billed woodpecker.
- There were already 11 extinct animals, making the total 23.
- The Endangered Species Act has been saving about 54 from going extinct since the 1970s.
The ivory-billed woodpecker is officially extinct.
The woodpecker, a bird well-known for its beauty and rumored appearances, joins the list of 22 other species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared extinct on Wednesday.
Added to the list are 11 other birds and two fish.
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The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to remove the 23 species from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) because none can be found in the wild. The ivory-billed woodpecker has been critically endangered for over a century, according to one expert who spoke to the Washington Post.
“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.,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We took all that away.”
The 23 species were added to the Endangered Species Act beginning in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the act made it illegal to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” species facing imperiling and seeking to protect their habitats.
And while the act has saved a lot of endangered species such as the bald eagle, brown pelican, gray wolf and American alligator, the Washington Post reports, the protections are not enough to save species that have been threatened for centuries.
“The Endangered Species Act wasn’t passed in time to save most of these species,” Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The New York Times. “It’s a tragedy.”
The Times reported since the act passed, 54 species in the U.S. have been removed from the endangered list because their populations have improved. Forty-eight have improved enough to move from endangered to threatened.
However, 11 listed species have been declared extinct: Pinta Giant Tortoise, Splendid Poison Frog, Spix’s Macaw, Pyrenean ibex, Bramble Cay Melomys, Western Black Rhino, Moorean Viviparous Tree Snail, Po‘ouli, Baiji, Maui ‘Akepa, and Alaotra Grebe.
“This is not an easy thing,” said Amy Trahan, Endangered Species Biologist at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) told The Post. “Nobody wants to be a part of that. Just having to write those words was quite difficult. It took me a while.”
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