The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a proposal Thursday to list the yellow-billed cuckoo of the Western United States, Canada, and Mexico as a threatened vertebrate population under the Endangered Species Act.

This past August, the agency proposed to protect over 500,000 acres in nine western states where the species currently inhabits, according to a recent statement from the Center for Biological Diversity. The proposal is expected to be finalized next year.

“Yellow-billed cuckoos were once common along rivers all over the West, but because of our poor treatment of western rivers, they’re now found in just a handful of places,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “With just a little more care, we can restore the rivers the cuckoo needs to survive, benefiting not just this unique songbird, but hundreds of other plants and animals and people too.”

The Center for Biological Diversity reports that the yellow-billed cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus, breeds in forests of cottonwood and willow that used to thrive along nearly every body of water in the western United States. However, recent causes such as the formation of dams, livestock grazing, and river channelization have been destroying the habitat of the species. Currently, there are scattered territories in rivers throughout California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, and Utah.

According to The Press Enterprise, the listing will be official Nov. 3, and the next steps for the team will involve identifying habitat areas that are most important for protection and developing a recovery plan. “The petition to protect yellow-billed cuckoos was the first I ever worked on, back in 1998,” said Greenwald. “I had no idea then that getting protection for this severely imperiled songbird would take 16 years, but I’m glad it finally has a great chance of recovering.”