Bermuda Petrel

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The Spanish never settled Bermuda. They would, however, anchor in the natural harbour (known today as Castle Harbour) which the islands formed. In 1609, British colonists (unimpressed by Spanish superstition) arrived upon the islands. Though they found no trace of devils, life on the islands proved extremely trying for them. Famines were frequent. In 1614, rats ate so much of their food that they were forced to evacuate the entire colony to the smaller Cooper’s Island, in the mouth of Castle Harbour.

On Cooper’s Island, the colonists found salvation in a small, grey-brown seabird that they called a Cahow. The bird nested on these smaller islands in the thousands and, in their hunger, the colonists fell upon their population. The feeding frenzy was so intense that, by the following breeding season, the bird seemed to have disappeared and the Governor was forced to issue a ‘Proclamation ganst the spoyle and havocke of the cahowes’. The colonists were starving, though. Within six years, they had eaten every last one.

With the death of the Cahow, the colony survived. Yet remnants of the bird would continue to surface for hundreds of years to come. In 1906, Louis L. Mowbray, director of the Bermuda Aquarium, pulled an unfamiliar animal from a crevice on the northernmost island. Ten years later, an ornithologist compared the bones to those of the Cahow and declared them to be identical. In 1935, an American Zoologist was gifted the body of an unidentifiable young bird which had crashed into a lighthouse. In 1941, Mowbray himself received a bird (this one still living) that had crashed into a radio tower. Four years later, a U.S. army soldier came across the remains of several dead birds upon a beach.

The incidents came to a head in 1951 when Mowbray’s son, Louis S. Mowbray, attempted to find the common truth behind them. He staged an expedition along with Robert Cushman Murphy, Grace E.B. Murphy and fifteen-year-old local schoolboy, David B. Wingate (who was known semi-affectionately as “Bird”). Together, they planned to survey the rocky islets that marked the mouth of Castle Harbour.

Upon one craggy island, Murphy reached down into a burrow in the rocks. It was deep and narrow and he worked his arm into the darkness. Eventually, he gripped bone. An unusual cry fled the burrow and, withdrawing his arm, Murphy held the bird aloft. It was brownish grey, with a white belly, neck and underwing. Its pink feet kicked and it turned its black bill from side to side, considering its assailant. This was the Cahow, and it was very much alive.

The reason that the Cahow (or Bermuda Petrel) had managed to survive beyond our knowledge for so long was a combination of its inhuman life cycle and the remoteness of its nesting grounds. The birds are born in burrows and remain underground for three months until they are old enough to fly. Once they are able, they take to the ocean. They spend the next four years ranging the seas, hundreds of miles from land, living only in the air or upon the water. Only when it comes time for them to mate do they return to land. Each November, the birds arrive in Bermuda by night, some having flown thousands of miles. They begin the process of digging burrows and carrying out their loud courtship. Once this is over, a pair of Cahows are mated for life, laying one egg per year.

The remoteness of the bird’s breeding grounds can be explained thusly: while the British were supposedly the ones to finish them off, it was the Spanish who had actually struck the first blow against the Cahow. While they had been too afraid to settle the islands, they had landed pigs upon Bermuda to support any shipwreck survivors. The pigs had subsequently spread and taken to rooting up Cahow, feeding upon whatever they found inside. In the hundred years before the British arrived, the pigs reduced the Cahow population from half a million to tens of thousands. No longer safe upon the main islands, the birds were forced to nest upon the smaller islands and islets, where the British would eventually hunt them down. Ultimately, the entire Cahow population was confined to four rocky islets in the mouth of Castle Harbour. Four tiny outcroppings which represented only one-thousandth of their original breeding grounds.

While the islets offered protection from the pigs and the humans (and the rats and the cats and the dogs and the lizards), they were now vulnerable to hurricanes, rising sea levels and erosion. This was the challenge that faced David “Bird” Wingate, in 1957, when he returned to Bermuda after graduating from Cornel University. Here was an entire species confined to a few collapsing rocks. And Wingate believed he knew how to save them.

Nonsuch Island (named by the colonists for its incomparable beauty) had become rather a waste over the past few centuries. Its trees had been felled for lumber and the grass stripped by a population of feral goats. The yellow fever hospital and the reform school which constituted its only buildings had been abandoned along with the island. There was no electricity, plumbing or protection from the elements. Wingate moved his family to live upon the island.

Wingate had resolved to battle extinction holistically: he intended to create a refuge for the Cahows by removing the invasive predators and plants from Nonsuch and restoring it to its pre-colonial state. Patrolling the island alone, he tore up weeds and trees at the root. He expelled rats and lizards and even went so far as to shoot a lone snowy owl that had personally eaten five percent of the Cahow population.

One of the greatest threats to the Cahow was the White-Tailed Tropicbird. Though native to Bermuda, humans had forced the bird into a territorial war with the Cahow and Tropicbirds would regularly invade Cahow burrows and stomp the chicks to death while the parents were out hunting. Wingate solved this problem by installing concrete burrows with baffled entrances on Nonsuch. These prohibited the larger Tropicbird from entering while the Cahow was able to easily slip inside.

Greater enemies of the Cahow – the property developers who sought to tear up their homes; the military tests and the spreading of chemicals like DDT that poisoned their nests – these would prove more difficult to remove than weeds and foreign trees. These were bureaucratic battles, but Wingate fought them, often alone, for fifty years. And he won.

Today, Nonsuch Island is an official wildlife sanctuary: a ‘living museum of pre-colonial Bermuda.’ While ninety-five percent of Bermuda’s flora is invasive (according to Wingate), Nonsuch itself is ninety-seven percent free of invasive species. Wingate’s effect upon the Cahow population is also clear. When they were rediscovered in 1951, only seventeen breeding pairs of Cahows existed in the world. By 2013, there were one hundred and five.

In November, the Cahows will return to Bermuda once more. Arriving by night, it is likely that most humans will fail to notice them. Much as we have for hundreds of years. The birds will begin to fill Wingate’s concrete burrows, or dig their own into the soil of Nonsuch, or cling to the rocky islets in the mouth of Castle Harbour. By the end of the month, they will be ready to mate. The long, uneven moan for which they are named will creep across the rocks of the harbour and out from the woods of Nonsuch. Perhaps superstitious soldiers in the bay will mistake their mating call for the sounds of devils, an omen of doom and death. But some, like the now-retired Wingate – perhaps sitting in his small boat inside the harbour – will understand that they are something else entirely.

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