What animals have disappeared (or become exceedingly rare) in recent history from places where they were once known? This question came to me last night as my spouse spotted a fox in our yard when we came in late from dinner. I’d never really seen a fox around here, but I assume that they were once somewhat common (I live in Southwest, Ohio).
But it got me to thinking about places, like Germany, where I hardly ever saw any wildlife. But once upon a time, in the not so distant past, Germany was covered in thick forest. What creatures dwelt there that are no longer? Lions, tigers or bears? Let’s put a boundary of the time since recorded history. Did walruses once wander along the quays of London? Did salmon actually spawn in the Ohio River (I vaguely recall reading this). Is there any fossil evidence that there were ever snakes in Ireland?
Southwest Ohio, specifically, used to have Bison, Elk (more properly Wapiti), Timber Wolf, Mountain Lion, Passenger Pigeon, and Carolina Parakeet, amomg others.
Species that have disappeared (or almost so) in historical times from Europe include the Aurochs, or wild cattle, the ancestor of domestic cattle, now extinct; the European Bison, or Wisent (a few survive in Poland) and Lion, which roamed the Balkan peninsula and Greece in the Classical Era. Wolves still survive, surprisingly, in parts of Europe, but are gone from settled areas. The bear that occurred in England was the Brown Bear. In Western Europe a few still survive in the mountains of France, Spain, and Italy, and further east in Scandinavia and Russia.
This question may be a little open-ended for this forum, but I’ll leave it here at least for now because I find this stuff so fascinating.
Lions: Lions disappeared from Greece around the first century, but they had been rare there for several centuries. There were still lions in Iran in the 1920s, and in Syria in the 1930s. There are still a few lions living in western India, in the Gir Sanctuary.
European bison (wisent) : The last two wild populations of European bison (one along the Poland-Lithuania border and one in the Caucuses) were destroyed around the time of World War I. Captive European bison from zoos were successfully reintroduced into the wild in the Poland-Lithuania border region in the 1950s.
European gray wolf: The last of the gray wolves were killed in Great Britan around 1740, and around 1770 in Ireland.
Mountain lions: They were once common in the Northeastern U.S. Here in New England the last of them was supposed to have been killed in the 1930s or 40s, IIRC. However, there have been persistent reported sightings by the public, of which wildlife officials are generally skeptical.
Gray wolves are making a major comeback in the Lower 48. They have been spotted in the suburbs of Minneapolis and one was shot in Maine in 1993.
The auroch went extinct by 1627. It flourished in Europe, and was an ancestor of modern cattle. Aurochs stood six feet tall, had shiny black fur, and curved horns. They looked like a hybrid of the wild ox and bison. In the German epic Nibelungenleid, the protaganist Sigfried slays four.
The Heath Hen was an East Coast version of the Prairie Chicken which is now extinct, and the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is also apparently gone, from the Southeast and probably Cuba as well.
On a more hopeful note there are several species that were once locally extinct and are now found around here (Eastern Mass) again. White tailed deer have come roaring back after being pretty much hunted out of this area. Same with black bears and wild turkeys. Beavers also I believe were essentially eradicated from this area by the early 20th century, but boy have we got them back. In the past few years moose have wandered within sight of the skyscrapers in downtown Boston. Bald Eagles and Peregrine Falcons are both becoming so common that seeing one in the wild is no longer exceptional, which was definitely not the case when I was a boy.
The turkeys and possibly also the beavers might have been partly restocked by people, and the falcons and eagle benefited from federal protection, but most of the others came back on their own, once we stopped shooting them quite as much (I have no problem with hunting, by the way).