These Five Birds Have Disappeared Forever. Their History Offers a Valuable Lesson for the Future

A search party of scientists and volunteers traipsed through hardwood forest, eyes and ears peeled for birds. On several mornings in March and April 2002, they scoured South Carolina’s Congaree National Park, stopping every 400 feet to play recordings of a distinctive call: a repeated, buzzy “zeep.” The sound, belonging to the olive, black and yellow Bachman’s warbler, had been recently reported in the area by an experienced birder. The species was known to be secretive, typically skulking low in the brush, but the experts felt sure that if the birds were there, they would respond to the audio.

Despite 166 hours of searching through 3,900 acres of forest, however, none of the target warblers called back. It seemed that the birds were nowhere to be found—but that wasn’t much of a surprise. No one had confidently documented a Bachman’s warbler in decades.

The most recent specimen had been collected from Mississippi in 1949, and the last confirmed sightings had been between 1958 and 1961 around Charleston, South Carolina. In 2023, with no further evidence that any of its kind were alive, the Bachman’s warbler was declared extinct by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Though the species may now be gone from the wild, a taxidermy specimen is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, alongside a group of other birds representing living and extinct biodiversity from across the country.

The exhibition where the specimens are found, “From These Lands: Sharing Our Natural and Cultural Heritage,” brings together an eclectic collection from the museum’s shelves that totals more than 600 natural history objects from all 50 states; Washington, D.C.; and five U.S. territories. Alongside wonders like a fossilized mastodon tooth, shimmering ammonites and wild rice, the collection features five extinct birds. Beyond the Bachman’s warbler, visitors can see the heath hen, Kauai oo and Carolina parakeet, as well as Martha, the last passenger pigeon.

These birds are meant to be a gateway that could prompt viewers to ask questions about their extinctions, says Torben Rick, curator of North American archaeology at the museum. Museum specimens of extinct species “act as a window into the past, showing us both what has been lost and what is still worth protecting,” says Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at the U.K. Center for Ecology & Hydrology.

A September report from BirdLife International found that 45 percent of migratory bird species are in decline worldwide, and one in nine of them are threatened with extinction. Climate change, which is shifting habitat conditions at a staggering pace, is putting two-thirds of North American birds at a rising risk of disappearing forever. And in the past 130,000 years, at least 1,300 to 1,500 bird species have gone extinct, dying out in multiple waves linked to human expansion.