Extinct Birds in Audubon's Birds of America: The Species List

In the fifth volume of the octavo Birds of America, printed in Philadelphia in 1842, the Passenger Pigeon and the Carolina Turtle-Dove follow each other as plates 285 and 286. One account runs straight into the next. The dove, now called the Mourning Dove, is the leading game bird in North America by total harvest. The pigeon has been gone since 1914. That pairing is the clearest way into the extinct birds in Audubon’s Birds of America. The book describes them as common, sometimes as a nuisance. It gives almost no hint that they would vanish.

This list works from the octavo text itself. It also draws on current assessments by Cornell Lab’s Birds of the World, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Canadian agencies. Nothing below is called extinct unless those sources call it extinct. Where a bird is only “possibly extinct”, or where agencies disagree, the page says so and names who says what.

The extinct birds list in Audubon’s seven volumes

The table gives Audubon’s own name for each bird. It shows where the account and plate sit in the octavo edition (1840 to 1844), the plate number in the earlier double-elephant folio, and the last record the sources accept. The octavo page is the first page of the account.

Bird (Audubon’s name)	Octavo vol., plate, page	Folio plate	Last accepted record	Status
Passenger Pigeon	V, 285, p. 25	62	Martha, Cincinnati Zoo, Sept. 1, 1914	Extinct
Carolina Parakeet (Carolina Parrot)	IV, 278, p. 306	26	Incas, Cincinnati Zoo, Feb. 21, 1918	Extinct
Great Auk	VII, 465, p. 245	341	Two adults killed on Eldey, Iceland, 1844	Extinct
Labrador Duck (Pied Duck)	VI, 400, p. 329	332	Specimen off Long Island, autumn 1875	Extinct
Heath Hen (in the Pinnated Grouse account)	V, 296, p. 93	–	Martha’s Vineyard, spring 1932	Subspecies extinct
Bachman’s Warbler (Bachman’s Swamp-Warbler)	II, 108, p. 93	185	No accepted US report after 1962	Delisted as extinct, USFWS, 2023
Eskimo Curlew (Esquimaux Curlew)	VI, 357, p. 45	208	Bird harvested on Barbados, 1963 (NWT program); 1987 (Alaska agency)	Critically Endangered
Ivory-billed Woodpecker	IV, 256, p. 214	66	Singer Tract, Louisiana, April 1944	Critically Endangered

The first four rows are extinct beyond any argument. The Heath Hen adds an extinct subspecies. The last three rows are where most lists online go wrong, in both directions. Some call the ivory-bill officially extinct, which the federal government never finalized. Some put the whole Pinnated Grouse on the extinct list, though the species survives.

The plate pages on this site cite the same volume and page scheme. One example is the Carolina Turtle Dove, plate 286, which sits right after the pigeon.

Passenger Pigeon: the 1813 flight Audubon timed

The passenger pigeon account in volume V runs from page 25 to page 35. It is the most quoted thing Audubon ever wrote. In the autumn of 1813 he was riding from his home at Henderson on the Ohio toward Louisville. He got off his horse and began marking a dot for every flock that passed. He gave up when the dots reached 163 in twenty-one minutes. Then he kept riding:

The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.

That passage is on page 27. The flight, he wrote, continued for three days, and the people of Louisville lived on pigeon for a week. Birds of the World now estimates the species at 3 to 5 billion birds before its collapse, perhaps a quarter of all the birds in North America.

Three pages further on, Audubon makes the mistake that turns the account into a historical document. He has just described the slaughter at a roost. Then he answers the obvious worry himself: “nothing but the gradual diminution of our forests can accomplish their decrease, as they not unfrequently quadruple their numbers yearly, and always at least double it” (vol. V, p. 30). He was right about the forests and wrong about everything else.

Smithsonian Magazine quotes the museum’s bird collections manager on what happened next. Forests cleared for houses and farms broke the flocks’ life cycle. Commercial hunters, alerted when a flock arrived, netted and shot birds that would not leave their wounded companions. Birds of the World adds the decisive point. During the critical period there were no uninterrupted and completely successful mass nestings, and the species needed them.

The last confirmed wild specimen dates from 1900. Martha, the last passenger pigeon anywhere, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. She was frozen into a 300-pound block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian, where she remains. One small detail in Audubon’s text still lands hard. In 1805 he saw schooners on the Hudson loaded in bulk with pigeons, sold in New York “for a cent a piece.”

The Carolina Parakeet, painted on cockle-bur

Audubon’s plate 278 shows Carolina Parakeets (his “Carolina Parrot”) tearing at the burs of cockle-bur. He spends most of a page complaining about that weed, because it tangled sheep’s wool and horses’ manes. The account in volume IV opens with one of his more disarming lines: “Doubtless, kind reader, you will say, while looking at the figures of Parakeets represented in the plate, that I spared not my labour.”

He also saw the decline coming, which he did not for the pigeon. On page 309 he writes: “Our Parakeets are very rapidly diminishing in number; and in some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, scarcely any are now to be seen.” Along the Mississippi, he guessed, there were not half as many as fifteen years before.

Birds of the World lists the causes as a cluster, not a single blow. Flocks stayed near wounded birds and were shot together. The bottomland forests they lived in were cleared. Honeybees competed for their nesting cavities, and poultry diseases may have played a part. The pet trade probably did not matter much. Smithsonian Magazine adds the feather trade and farmers who killed the birds as crop pests.

The last confirmed wild bird was killed in Florida in 1904. The last captive, a male named Incas, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on February 21, 1918. The zoo had bought him with 15 other parakeets in 1885 for $40.

This parakeet nested in hollow trees and lost its cavities to imported bees. It is a reminder of why cavity nesters are fussy about holes. The birdhouse guide covers the entrance sizes that today’s cavity-nesting species actually need.

Two North Atlantic species Audubon barely saw

The great auk and labrador duck accounts are among the shortest in the octavo. The reason is simple: Audubon had almost nothing first-hand to report on either.

Great Auk

The great auk account in volume VII (plate 465, page 245) is barely a page of narrative. It opens with an admission: “The only authentic account of the occurrence of this bird on our coast that I possess, was obtained from Mr. Henry Havell, brother of my Engraver, who, when on his passage from New York to England, hooked a Great Auk on the banks of Newfoundland, in extremely boisterous weather.” On deck, the bird “walked very awkwardly, often tumbling over, bit every one within reach of its powerful bill, and refused food of all kinds,” and after several days it was put back into the sea.

The rest is hearsay, and Audubon labels it as such. Labrador fishermen told him that the “Penguin,” as they called it, still bred on a low rocky island southeast of Newfoundland. An old gunner at Chelsea Beach near Boston remembered when it was plentiful around Nahant. His range line reads “Rare and accidental on the Banks of Newfoundland.”

Volume VII is dated 1844, the same year the species ended. Birds of the World records that the last two confirmed adults were killed on Eldey Island, Iceland, in 1844, for European collectors. The Natural History Museum in London notes that the hunters also crushed their single egg, and that a last living bird was seen in 1852. This was a large flightless bird crowded into a few big colonies, the largest on Funk Island off Newfoundland. For centuries it had been taken for food, fat, bait and feathers. Collectors paying huge sums for a skin or an egg finished what the fishermen started.

Labrador Duck

Audubon called it the Pied Duck. His volume VI account (plate 400, page 329) begins: “Although no birds of this species occurred to me when I was in Labrador…” His son John Woodhouse Audubon found deserted nests near Blanc Sablon on July 28, 1833. The English clerk of a fishing station said they belonged to this duck.

The pair in the plate came from an unexpected source. “The Honourable Daniel Webster of Boston,” Audubon writes, “sent me a fine pair killed by himself, on the Vineyard Islands, on the coast of Massachusetts, from which I made the drawing for the plate before you.”

Audubon’s other notes are those of a shopper, not a field observer. He saw several birds in the Baltimore market. He also met a bird-stuffer at Camden who caught them on trot-lines baited with mussels. The Sea Duck Joint Venture uses the same detail to infer a diet of mollusks.

Then the record simply stops. Birds of the World gives the last specimens as a bird shot at Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, in April 1871, and one shot off Long Island in the autumn of 1875. Its numbers fell so fast that few people noticed, so the cause is still open. The Sea Duck Joint Venture offers one possibility: disturbance on the breeding grounds, such as foxes reaching isolated nesting islands. It also notes that the breeding range itself was never confirmed. Fewer than 60 skins, mounts and bones survive in museums.

Heath Hen: an extinct subspecies inside the Pinnated Grouse

Audubon’s Pinnated Grouse (volume V, plate 296, page 93) is today’s Greater Prairie-Chicken, and the species is alive. Birds of the World rates it Near Threatened. What disappeared was its eastern subspecies, the Heath Hen.

The octavo account covers both without separating them. Most of it is Audubon in the Kentucky Barrens, where the birds were abundant and he heard their booming at dawn for years. Then, on page 95, he turns east. He lists the last places the grouse could still be found on the Atlantic side: parts of New Jersey, the “brushy” plains of Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, the Elizabeth Islands and Mount Desert Island in Maine. In the first three, “notwithstanding the preventive laws now in force, they are killed without mercy by persons such as in England are called poachers, even while the female bird is in the act of sitting on her eggs.”

Those laws were old even then. Birds of the World notes that legislation to protect the Heath Hen from market hunting was passed in 1791, one of the earliest wildlife laws in North America. It was not enough. The last birds held out on Martha’s Vineyard. The state bought 600 acres there as a preserve in 1908, land that later became the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest.

According to the Vineyard Gazette, the island flock peaked around 1916, with as many as 800 counted and an estimate of 2,000. Then a fire in May 1916 burned between 11,000 and 13,000 acres. The count fell to 314 in 1920, 75 in 1922 and 17 in 1924. One male, known as Booming Ben, was last seen in the spring of 1932 at the Green Farm in West Tisbury.

Three species in doubt

These three are the reason a responsible list of extinct birds in Audubon’s book needs a second category. Each has gone decades without a confirmed record. Each is treated differently by different authorities.

Eskimo Curlew

Audubon’s account (volume VI, plate 357, page 45) starts with an apology: “I regret that I am unable to present a complete history of the Esquimaux Curlew.” Before his 1833 voyage he had seen a single bird. Then, on July 29, 1833, in fog near the harbor of Bras d’Or in Labrador, the curlews arrived from the north “in such dense flocks as to remind me of the Passenger Pigeons.” The comparison is grim in hindsight.

Hunting in the second half of the 19th century was the main cause of the collapse, according to Birds of the World and the Northwest Territories species-at-risk program. It was worst along the spring migration routes in North America. The loss of the Rocky Mountain grasshopper and the conversion of prairie prevented any recovery.

The sources disagree on the last record. The Northwest Territories species-at-risk program gives a bird harvested on Barbados in 1963 as the last confirmed record, while the Alaska Department of Fish and Game gives 1962 as the last documented sighting and 1987 as the last confirmed one. Birds of the World lists the species as Critically Endangered. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game calls it likely extinct. It remains listed as endangered in both the United States and Canada.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker

The ivory-bill account (volume IV, plate 256, page 214) is where Audubon compares the bird’s plumage to the paintings of Van Dyck. He admits that whenever he saw one fly between trees he thought, “There goes a Vandyke!” Even in his day it was confined to a small part of the country. He notes it had never been seen in the Middle States within living memory.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service gives April 1944, on the Singer Tract in northeast Louisiana, as the last commonly agreed sighting. Birds of the World adds that James Tanner took the last universally accepted photographs in the United States in 1938. It also reports that a Cuban subspecies was last reported in 1992 without photos or recordings.

The Service proposed declaring the species extinct in 2021. In July 2022 it extended its deadline, “recognizing substantial disagreement among experts regarding the status of the species.” Its October 2023 rule left the woodpecker out and promised a separate decision. Its species page still lists the bird as Endangered. Birds of the World rates it Critically Endangered. Sightings in Arkansas in 2004 were published in Science in 2005, and no search since has produced unequivocal evidence. On this one, honesty means leaving the question open.

Bachman’s Warbler

Audubon never saw a living one. His account (volume II, plate 108, page 93) says so: “I myself have never had the good fortune to meet with any individuals of this interesting Sylvia.” His friend John Bachman found the first near Charleston in July 1833, while Audubon was in Labrador. The flower in the plate was drawn by “Miss Martin,” whom Audubon calls his friend’s sister. The Library of Congress name record identifies her as Maria Martin (Bachman), one of Audubon’s assistants.

Of the three, this is the one with an official verdict. The US Fish and Wildlife Service removed Bachman’s Warbler from the endangered list due to extinction in a rule effective November 16, 2023. The rule records the last confirmed nest in 1937. It also records no officially accepted documented US observation after 1962, and two sightings in Cuba’s Zapata Swamp in the 1960s.

In January 2021, Kenn Kaufman noted in Audubon Magazine that the IUCN still listed it as Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct). That is the same tag it gave the Eskimo Curlew. The federal finding and the global list are not saying exactly the same thing.

Why these extinct birds disappeared

The common explanation, hunting, is true but incomplete. Read across the accounts and the modern sources, and a sharper pattern shows. The birds that went first were the ones that gathered. The pigeon nested in colonies of millions. The parakeet flew in flocks that would not leave a wounded bird. The auk lived on a handful of rocks, the curlew on a few migration routes, the Heath Hen on one island at the end. Concentration let hunters take them faster than they could breed. Habitat loss removed the places where a smaller population might have recovered.

Collectors then finished several of them, and that part deserves to be said directly. The last Great Auks were killed for European collectors, and specimen demand rose as the birds became rare. The forest birds lost their forests. The ivory-bill needed extensive old-growth forest. Bachman’s Warbler was listed in 1967 because its breeding and wintering habitat was gone.

Audubon’s own text is useful precisely because it shows how normal all of this looked at the time. He saw Labrador Ducks for sale in the Baltimore market. He recommended the flavor of doves. He saw no threat to the pigeon. Some of their neighbors in the book are still everywhere. The Mourning Dove printed next to the pigeon in volume V numbered about 346 million in the United States in September 2023, by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s estimate. It is one of the ground feeders covered in the bird feeder guide.

Audubon’s mystery birds

A different set of lost birds causes regular confusion. Several of the forms Audubon painted have never been matched to any known species. They are sometimes listed as extinct. They are better described as unidentified. The Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth lists six: Cuvier’s Kinglet, the Carbonated Warbler, Townsend’s Bunting, Bartram’s Vireo, the Blue Mountain Warbler and the Small-headed Flycatcher.

Townsend’s Bunting is the solved one. The library describes it as an aberrant Dickcissel that lacked the normal yellow pigments. Cuvier’s Kinglet may have been a Golden-crowned Kinglet with abnormal dark plumage. The Carbonated Warbler may have been a rare yellow form of the Blackpoll Warbler, or a painting made from memory after the original drawing was destroyed by rats. None of these counts as an extinct species, because none was ever shown to be a species.

Extinct birds beyond Audubon: the dodo and the global count

The best-known extinct bird of all never appears in Audubon’s book. The dodo lived only on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. It was gone more than a century before Audubon was born in 1785. Dutch sailors first met it in 1598. The Natural History Museum in London puts the last reliable sighting in 1662, or possibly as late as 1680. It points to the animals that came with people, which killed the birds and probably ate their eggs, as a bigger cause than hunting alone. The dodo stood about 70 centimeters (roughly 28 inches) tall and weighed around 12 kilograms (about 26 pounds). That is leaner than the fat bird of popular pictures. Its closest living relative is the Nicobar Pigeon of Southeast Asia.

For the wider picture, the count depends on the date. As of mid-January 2021, the IUCN Red List listed 159 bird species as Extinct and 5 as Extinct in the Wild, with 22 more Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct), according to Kaufman’s summary. He adds the necessary caveat that many island birds vanished before anyone described them. The true number of extinct birds since 1500 cannot be known. Most of the documented losses were on islands. Hawaii alone has lost more than 30 species.

Reading Audubon’s own accounts today

Every quotation about the extinct birds in Audubon’s Birds of America comes from the seven-volume octavo edition, and every volume of it is free to read. Smithsonian Libraries scanned a complete set, which is available through the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Internet Archive. The title pages date the volumes from 1840 (volume I) to 1844 (volume VII). Plate numbers run straight through from 1 to 500, so a plate number is enough to find any bird. The Birds of America section explains how the site’s own page numbers map onto that sequence.

One small pleasure of reading the originals: each account ends with a dry block of synonyms and measurements that Audubon’s readers skipped. The Great Auk’s gives the egg as five inches long and three in its greatest breadth, yellowish-white with brownish-black blotches. It is a measurement taken from an egg of a bird he never saw alive. Elsewhere on the site, the purple martin pages deal with a colonial bird that people still house in the hundreds, and the index lists the rest.