Feds remove 21 now-extinct species from endangered list

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has delisted 21 species from the federal Endangered Species Act due to their extinction.

Most of the species were first covered under the act in the 1970s and 1980s when their numbers were already precipitously low and when some may have already gone extinct, the agency said.

“Federal protection came too late to reverse these species’ decline, and it’s a wake-up call on the importance of conserving imperiled species before it’s too late,” U.S. FWS Director Martha Williams said in a statement.

Among the species now considered officially extinct, there is one mammal, a fruit bat formerly found in Guam, and two species of fish. Birds and mussels featured heavily, with eight bird species formerly found in the state of Hawaii and eight mussels formerly found in the American Southeast also included for delisting.

Another two birds, one formerly native to Guam and one formerly native to Florida and South Carolina, rounded out the list.

Two species were originally slated to be declared extinct but were removed from delisting consideration. One is a Hawaiian herb that could live in habitats uncovered in more recent surveys.

The other is the ivory-billed woodpecker. The last widely accepted sighting of the bird, also native to the Southeast, occurred in 1944. Unofficial sightings of the woodpecker have continued over the years. 

A May study in the journal Ecology and Evolution said that about 70,000 hours of audio recordings, about 472,550 hours of trail camera footage and about 1,089 hours of drone video footage taken from 2012 to 2022, determining that multiple individuals of the species still exist.

The data suggested “intermittent but repeated presence of multiple individual birds with field marks and behaviors consistent with those of ivory-billed woodpeckers. Data indicate repeated reuse of foraging sites and core habitat. … not all is lost for the ivory-billed woodpecker, and that it is clearly premature for the species to be declared extinct,” the study’s authors wrote.