The list of animals that have gone extinct throughout history is extremely long. Animals go extinct for many reasons, including a failure to adapt, loss of habitat, human hunting, disease, and more.

For whatever reason, humans tend to latch onto certain species of animals and their stories and feel particularly bad when they go extinct.

The Dodo bird is a great example of this, and it may be the most famous extinct animal in modern history.

While not nearly as widely known, there is a Hawaiian bird that has gone extinct that many people have fallen in love with at least in part, due to the fact that the last known recording of its song is available publicly. If you want to give it a listen, you can find it here.

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō is a small Hawaiian honeyeater that lives on Kauai. It was about 20 centimeters (8 inches) long and had black feathers except on its legs, where the feathers were yellow.

IT primarily ate flowers using its specialized tongue that came out of its bill, which was curved slightly downward.

In many ways, its song is not unlike that of other birds, but it is the story of the recording that often captures people’s attention.

In 1967, this bird was first listed as endangered by the US Government. It wasn’t until 2000 that the IUCN declared teh species extinct, even though the last known wild sighting was in 1985.

In 1986, however, ornithologist Jim Jacobi, who had a captive Kauaʻi ʻōʻō decided to record its call. The recording largely went unnoticed until in 2022 Hannah Hunter, who was a PhD candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario at the time, was researching the sounds of species that were extinct when she came across it. She told The Conversation:

“We have no way of knowing if this was the very last bird, but it’s hard not to listen as if it were.”

Indeed, this is a special recording that will hopefully serve as a lasting reminder of just how fragile animals can be, and drive humans to do better at preserving them.

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