(CNN) — The ivory-billed woodpecker, along with 22 other species of birds, fish, mussels and other wildlife, is set to be declared extinct and removed from the endangered species list, U.S. wildlife officials announced Wednesday.
Though the last confirmed sighting of the woodpecker was in the 1940s, some ornithologists plan to challenge the reclassification.
Also slated for delisting are the Bachman’s warbler, two species of freshwater fishes, eight species of Southeastern freshwater mussels and 11 species from Hawaii and the Pacific Islands.
“For the species proposed for delisting today, the protections of the (Endangered Species Act) came too late, with most either extinct, functionally extinct, or in steep decline at the timing of listing,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.
The species placed on the extinction list had not been seen in decades, so their inclusion came as little surprise to experts.
More concerning are species on the wait list for protection by the wildlife agency, said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity.
The monarch butterfly is of particular concern, she said. It wasn’t added to the federal endangered species list in December and won’t be reconsidered until 2024.
“It means the population can crash with no protection,” Curry said, noting climate change, hotter temperatures and pesticide use threaten the butterfly’s migration pattern and food sources. “It’s beloved; it used to be common.”
The proposal to delist the 23 species announced Wednesday will be open for public comment until the end of December, the agency said.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was never known as a common bird because it depended on large Southern swamps with lots of space and food to thrive, according to the American Bird Conservancy. Once its habitat began to disappear because of uncontrolled logging, the woodpecker became scarce. It was frequently shot by hunters and collectors, which likely contributed to its disappearance, the conservancy said.
The last positively confirmed sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States was in Louisiana in the 1940s, said John Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. But there are reports of sightings and grainy video of the bird dating to the early 2000s in eastern Arkansas that haven’t been confirmed.
“My view, it’s way premature to declare the bird extinct officially on the part of the US Fish and Wildlife Service because the bird may still exist,” he told CNN. “The point of declaring something extinct is having rock solid evidence that it is gone.”
Fitzpatrick and other ornithologists will petition the wildlife agency during the comment period to take the bird off the extinction list, he said.
I’m hopeful they’ll take another look at this and say we can actually pull this back for another decade or two,” Fitzpatrick said. “We continue to say it’s worth searching for this bird.”
The-CNN-Wire
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