One of the most enigmatic birds of the old Fyrewood was the yellow-billed woodpecker. As large as a hawk or eagle, according to the few stuffed skins that remain, it was only ever found in the deepest part of the Fyrewood. Despite being known to locals for centuries, no one had ever seen it nesting or breeding, and young animals were similarly totally unknown.
While never abundant, the yellow-billed woodpecker was driven to extinction as the result of the intensive logging of the Fyrewood before the personal union. Despite the pleas of ornithologists and other learned people of a scholarly bent, the logging concerns did not stay their axes even when they began recovering dozens of dead woodpeckers in the fallen trees.
In the years since then, with the regrowth of the Fyrewood, many scholars have continued to be fascinated by the yellow-billed woodpecker both for its large size and its sudden extinction–the first such bird to be wiped out in living memory. Funded by the Prince-Bishop himself, several expeditions per year have attempted to find surviving birds, to no avail.
Nevertheless, records of sightings persist, and not all of them can be explained away by the similarly-sized red-beaked woodpecker. Many hold out hope that this elusive species yet remains in the depths of the Fyrewood.
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