Ivory-billed woodpecker

The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) is a woodpecker that was native to the bottomland hardwood forests and temperate coniferous forests of the Southern United States and Cuba. The US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing it as extinct September 29, 2021. Habitat destruction and hunting have reduced populations so thoroughly that the species is listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on its Red List as critically endangered, and by the American Birding Association as "definitely or probably extinct". The last universally accepted sighting of an American ivory-billed woodpecker occurred in Louisiana in 1944, and the last universally accepted sighting of a Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker occurred in 1987, after the bird's rediscovery there the prior year. Sporadic reports of sightings and other evidence of the persistence of the species have continued since then.