Spanish sailors anchored off Bermuda in the 1500’s trembled in their galleons as ghostly wails emanated through night skies. Had they known sleek seabirds with fluffed out chicks were the source of these eerie calls, they might not have presumed the islands haunted and left them unclaimed for later British settlement. Sadly, these later settlers were not deterred by night wailings and Bermuda Petrels, locally called cahows based on their calls, went from nightmare fodder to favored food. Between hunting and pressures from non-native animals introduced with human settlement, it wasn’t long before the birds were judged forever gone. Gone that is until a tenacious school boy joined an expedition in 1951 that rediscovered cahows nesting on off-shore islands.

Staring at a football-sized explosion of downy cahow feathers on Nonsuch Island, I couldn’t help but marvel at the hurdles that had to be overcome for this chick and its neighbors to be here today. Cahow numbers had been incredibly low when rediscovered and efforts to save them were complicated by any number of challenges. Storms engulfed nesting islands, DDT claimed many a life, military lighting at night interfered with courtship, White-tailed Tropicbirds caused cahow chicks to die as they claimed petrel nests for their own reproduction; the list goes on. Fortunately, the boy who helped rediscover the Bermuda Petrel in the first place, David Wingate, grew into a man who stopped at nothing to save this species. He met each new challenge to the population with relentless determination, resolving one obstacle after another.