Giant deer and mammoths in the Ice Age caves, bears into the Bronze Age, wolves until the 18th century, and eagles shot and poisoned out of the sky until the 1900s. Some have come back.
A "last" date is only as good as whoever claims it. Where a date is tradition, or sources disagree, we say so and name the source. Radiocarbon ages marked "BP" are raw, not calendar years. Where we found no source, we leave a gap.
Giant deer (Irish elk) · Woolly mammoth · Brown bear · Wolf · Eurasian lynx · Wild boar · Great auk · Golden eagle · White-tailed eagle · Red kite · Common crane · Capercaillie
Megaloceros giganteus · Fia mór na mbeann (Vicipéid) · Gone from Ireland
Wikipedia says the species is known in Ireland "from abundant remains found in bogs". Thomas Molyneux described antlers from Dardistown in 1695; the holotype skull that fixed the scientific name came from the Dunleer area. Despite the name it was not an elk: mitochondrial DNA places it close to red deer and fallow deer.
Mammuthus primigenius · Irish name: none found in our sources · Gone from Ireland
Richard Ussher excavated Castlepook between 1904 and 1912 and called it Mammoth Cave because of the number of woolly mammoth remains there. A reindeer bone from the same cave with butchery marks was dated in 2021 to about 33,000 years ago. Fauna of Ireland lists the mammoth among Ireland's Last Glacial mammals. Reports giving "33,000" or "35,000 years" for the mammoth itself do not cite a date on a mammoth bone, so we leave it undated.
Ursus arctos · Béar donn (Vicipéid) · Gone from Ireland
Ruth Carden identified a bear patella with cut marks from Alice and Gwendoline Cave, near Ennis, in the National Museum's collection in 2011. It was radiocarbon-dated to 10,860–10,641 cal. BC, potentially the oldest evidence of people in Ireland, though archaeologists including Jesse Tune question the dating of the cut marks. DNA shows the Irish bear was intermediate between modern brown and polar bears. Habitat loss and hunting are blamed for its end.
Alice and Gwendoline Cave on our caves page →
Wikipedia: Bears in Ireland ↗ · Wikipedia: Alice and Gwendoline Cave ↗
Canis lupus · Mac tíre (also faol, cú allaidh) (Wikipedia) · Gone from Ireland
Wikipedia calls a wolf hunted down near Mount Leinster in 1786 for killing sheep "the last reliable observation" of a wolf in Ireland, while its opening line says the last wild wolf "is said to have been killed" then. Other claims survive: Roderic O'Flaherty's 1846 edition traces a last wolf in Joyce Country in 1700, and the Ulster Journal of Archaeology (1854) has the last one killed at Glenelly by a mare defending her foal. Treat all of them as tradition. Cromwellian bounties of 1652 paid £6 for a female wolf; the oldest Irish wolf bone, from Castlepook Cave, Co. Cork, dates to 34,000 BC.
Lynx lynx · Lincse Eoráiseach (Vicipéid) · Gone from Ireland
Fauna of Ireland says lynx remains are known from some Holocene sites. The RADON-B database records an Oxford accelerator date of 8875 ± 70 BP on lynx bone collagen from Kilgreany Cave (Hedges et al., Archaeometry 39, 1997). That is a raw radiocarbon age, not calendar years. We found no source saying when the lynx disappeared.
Sus scrofa · Torc allta (Vicipéid) · Gone; feral animals only today
Boar bones are among the prey at Mount Sandel, about 9,000 years old. Viney, drawing on UCC mammalogist Paddy Sleeman, says the boar went extinct in Neolithic times, mainly as farmers cleared the forest. The boar seen in Leinster and elsewhere today are escapes or releases; Invasive Species Ireland treats them as an introduced alien and agencies North and South have tried to remove them.
Pinguinus impennis · Falcóg mhór (Wikipedia) · Gone from Ireland
Trinity College Dublin says its great auk "was captured in Ballymacaw, off Brownstown Head, Co. Waterford in 1834" and was presented to the college museum about ten years later by a Dr Burkitt, who was given a "Great Auk Pension" of £50 a year. The stuffed bird is still in TCD's Zoological Museum and was conserved in 2009.
Aquila chrysaetos · Iolar fíréan (Vicipéid) · Gone, then returned
Forty-six birds were released in Glenveagh from 2001 to 2006, and in April 2007 a pair produced the first chick hatched in the Republic in nearly a century. Wikipedia gives Ireland two pairs and lists the bird as of High Conservation Concern.
Wikipedia: Status and conservation of the golden eagle ↗ · Wikipedia: Fauna of Ireland ↗
Haliaeetus albicilla · Iolar mara earrbhán (Vicipéid) · Gone, then returned
Young eagles from Norway were released in Killarney from the summer of 2007. A hundred sheep farmers protested at Kerry airport. The first breeding pair since 1912 nested on Lough Derg a century later; the first chicks hatched in May 2013, one in Killarney and two in Clare, and in 2015 chicks hatched in Clare, Cork, Galway and Kerry. Seven released eagles were confirmed poisoned in Kerry.
Milvus milvus · Cúr rua (Vicipéid) · Gone, then returned
The first 30 kites from Wales were released in Wicklow on 19 July 2007, and the first chicks were found in May 2010. In Northern Ireland, 80 Welsh birds were released between 2008 and 2010. Wikipedia reports the Irish government confirming in 2026 that the Wicklow reintroduction was complete. Persecution, poisoning and woodland clearance had killed off the original birds.
Grus grus · Grús coiteann (Vicipéid) · Gone, then returned
Visiting flocks were seen in the 2000s, and in 2021 a pair bred "for the first time on the island in 300 years", Wikipedia says, which elsewhere puts the extinction at over 200 years. The two figures are its own. The grey heron is still often called a "crane" in Ireland.
Tetrao urogallus · Capall coille (Vicipéid) · Gone from Ireland
Wikipedia says the bird was common in Ireland until the 17th century and extirpated in the 18th. Richard Collins in the Irish Examiner notes Douglas Deane's 1981 argument in Irish Birds that there are no eye-witness accounts of Irish capercaillie at all, and that Gerald of Wales's "peacocks of the woods" may have misled later writers. Nineteenth-century attempts to reintroduce it at Glengarriff (Cork) and the Markree Castle estate (Sligo) failed. We found no dates or numbers for those attempts.
The date usually given is 1786, when a wolf was hunted down near Mount Leinster, Co. Carlow, for killing sheep. Wikipedia calls it the last reliable observation, but other "last wolf" stories survive, including Joyce Country in 1700 and Glenelly, so treat it as tradition rather than a recorded fact.
Yes. A native brown bear lived here and is believed to have died out around 1000–500 BC. A bear kneecap with cut marks from Alice and Gwendoline Cave in Co. Clare, dated to about 10,800 BC, may be the oldest evidence of people in Ireland.
The golden eagle (Donegal, from 2001), white-tailed eagle (Kerry, from 2007) and red kite (Wicklow, from 2007) were reintroduced. The common crane bred again in 2021, and the buzzard, little egret and great spotted woodpecker returned on their own.
Each animal links its own sources. Irish names come from the Irish-language Wikipedia or the English article that cites them; we have not translated any. We found no Irish name in our sources for the woolly mammoth. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA 4.0. Read October 2026.
Know a local "last wolf" or "last eagle" story? Tell us. · Ireland's wildlife today · Bogs · Native trees · National parks