Elizabeth Gehrman - Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction

Photo by Chris Burville

The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction

ELIZABETH GEHRMAN

BEACON PRESS, BOSTON

For my parents

Map by Bruce Adams

IN APRIL 2009, JUST two months short of four hundred years since the English ship Sea Venture wrecked on the jagged, shallow reefs encircling Bermuda and claimed the island for the Crown, I pounded over the choppy waters of Castle Harbour in a Boston Whaler Montauk with Jeremy Madeiros, the countrys terrestrial conservation officer, to an island the early settlers called Nonsuchpronounced Nonesuchfor its unparalleled natural beauty.

The land has changed so dramatically since the early seventeenth century that its hard to say why Nonsuch seemed more breathtaking to untraveled British eyes than any of the 137 other islands that make up this 21-square-mile archipelago alone in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Two miles by boat from Tuckers Town, where today you can pick up a summer cottage for $20 million or so, the long, low mound of rocky coastline topped with scrubby vegetation would seem unremarkable were it not for what is happening there.

I had heard in passing about a bird called the cahow, or Bermuda petrel, during the half-dozen trips Id made to the country since the previous summer, when I was sent there to write a travel story for a magazine. But, like most people who know of itincluding, it seems, many BermudiansI had only a vague notion that the cahow was somehow significant. I had no idea how fascinating its tale was, and how instructive a warning it provided of humankinds power over nature, for good or ill.

Madeiros gave me the condensed version as we disembarked at the islands concrete dock and set off toward a small cluster of whitepeaked buildings painted, in the traditional style, a sunny pastel. The compound was once a quarantine hospital; Madeiros and his family now shared it with cockroaches, endemic skinks, and wolf spiders as big as your palm.

The cahow, he said, was believed extinct since the early 1600s, just a few years after Bermuda was colonized. Like its more famous kin the dodo, discovered in 1598 and last sighted less than a century later, the cahow had no significant predators until the arrival of man and his attendant rats, cats, dogs, and pigs. The trusting and docile birds were no match for the clubs and claws and teeth that bore down on them, and just eleven years after the wreck of the Sea Venture, the first known conservation legislation in the Western Hemisphere was issued for the cahows protectionbut as far as anyone could tell, the birds were already gone.

But imagine if a dodo were to suddenly stride out from under the forest canopy of the Indian Ocean island its ancestors once occupied. It was just as much of a jolt to the scientific community and the public when, in 1951, the cahow was rediscovered, clinging to survival on a few barren rocks in the only place on earth it calls home.

Accompanying the expedition that found the first live cahow seen in modern times was a fifteen-year-old Bermudian boy named David Wingate, who would grow up to devote his life to restoring Nonsuch to its virgin state and returning the cahow to its place in the world. For decades, Wingate alone worked to save the birds. He fought incredible odds in a race against time, more than once proving colleagues who called him crazy dead wrong. In an era before conservation became a household word, he had no template and virtually no government fundingbut he gave the birds the chance they needed in their centuries-long fight for survival.

Madeiros, who took over the project when mandatory retirement forced Wingate to step down as conservation officer in 2000, led me to the artificial concrete burrows that dotted the ground a few steps from the backyard of his summer house, the only residence on Nonsuch. He removed the concave top of one to reveal what appeared to be a sooty, squirming, oversized cotton ball, and gently lifted Somers, as he called the birdafter Admiral Sir George Somers, Bermudas founderout of his dark, grass-lined nest and handed him to me.

Thus, on protected land that is as close an approximation of pre-Columbian Bermuda as can be achieved, I became one of only a few people in the world to hold the first cahow chick born on Nonsuch in almost four hundred years. Somers was the premier product of a translocation project started in 2005 that aims to move the birds off the rocky islets they now inhabit to an area less endangered by erosion and hurricanes, and more like the land they once so gregariously dominated.

The almost weightless bird sat placidly in my cupped hands, a coconut-sized ball of fluff with two stuffed-toy eyes and a beak the color of pencil lead. As I scratched the back of his neck with my thumb, Somers curled his head back in pleasure, revealing his reptilian roots in his exposed ear hole and the thin, wrinkled skin beneath his inches-thick gray down. He squeaked like a trapped mouse when I passed him back to Madeiros to be placed in a small canvas bag for weighing.

Encountering an untamed animal in the wild, as I had before on precious few occasions, is always a moving experience. This time it was made more so by the knowledge that Somers and the two-hundred-odd birds like him that constitute an entire species fought so hard to get here and remain locked in a daily battle to persist.

Before visiting Bermuda, I had never traveled to the same country even twice in a row, much less six times. But in that first week I learned enough about the island to know it was bursting with stories waiting to be told. Something about the place kept tugging me back, and in getting to know the residents, I heard about shipwrecks and treasures of gold, Civil War blockade runners and World War II U-boat patrols, unique cave species and millennia-old subaquatic cedar forests.

And then I met Somers. I had found the story I needed to tell.

DAVID WINGATE WANTS TO see his birds. This is cahow weather, he says, peering through the rain-splashed windshield of his white Suzuki Alto at treetops dancing violently in the wind. We may be miserable, but the cahows are just yippee-happy right now. If we could go out to Nonsuch tonight, theyd be celebrating.

Just a handful of people have seen cahows in flight, and even fewer have witnessed the staggeringly graceful, scramjet-fast aerial courtship they perform on only the darkest fall and winter nights. Wingate, though, has spent enough time with the birds that he has felt their wings brush the top of his head as they darted past him in the blackened sky, gliding ever slower through the air before dropping to land like a cartoon anvil. But in the past few years things have changed, and troubles from bad knees to bad blood have conspired to keep him from the birds he calls his first love.

This week hes supposed to make his first trip to Nonsuch at night in two years. Hed been trying to get out thereor at least into the harbor in his boatfor a night watch once or twice every November since he moved off the island in 2003, but last year he didnt go because of the knee-replacement surgery that laid him up for six months and left six-inch vertical scars in the dead center of both his legs. Before thatwell, its a long story.