Nonsuch Island and the cahow

Declared extinct for 300 years, then found again in 1951

When Cristóbal Colón sailed past Bermuda in 1492, perhaps half a million pairs of a long-winged seabird nested across the islands. Bermudians call it the cahow, after its eerie night cries; the world knows it as the Bermuda petrel. Spanish sailors using the islands as a waypoint took up to 4,000 birds a night for food, according to Diego Ramírez in 1603, and turned hogs loose that rooted up the burrows. The castaways of the Sea Venture, wrecked in 1609, ate the fattest birds and their eggs, and the English settlers who followed brought rats, cats and dogs and burned the woods. In 1614 rats drove the hungry colonists to Cooper's Island, where they ate many of the breeding birds, and Governor Daniel Tucker issued one of the world's earliest conservation decrees, against "the spoyle and havocke of the Cohowes." It was too late. By about 1620 the cahow was gone, and for 300 years it was thought extinct.

Hints kept surfacing. Bones from Crystal Cave allowed it to be described to science in 1916; in 1935 a young bird that struck the St. David's lighthouse was identified as a cahow; in 1941 another hit a radio tower and was nursed back to health. Then, on 28 January 1951, the ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy and the naturalist Louis Mowbray found 18 nesting pairs on rocky islets in Castle Harbour. With them was a 15-year-old Bermudian named David Wingate.

Wingate gave his working life to the bird. In 1966 he became Bermuda's first conservation officer. He cleared rats from the nesting islets and designed wooden baffles for the burrow entrances, sized to admit petrels but keep out the larger white-tailed tropicbirds that had been killing up to 75 percent of the chicks. On nearby Nonsuch Island, a near desert after centuries of abuse, he began planting in 1962 almost 10,000 native and endemic plants of more than 100 species, among them Bermuda cedar, palmetto and olivewood, until a closed-canopy forest like the one the first settlers found grew back.

Nonsuch was meant to become a home for the birds, safe from the hurricanes and rising seas eroding the four tiny original islets. Between 2004 and 2008 Wingate's successor, Jeremy Madeiros, with the Australian petrel specialist Nicholas Carlile, moved 105 near-grown chicks to artificial burrows on Nonsuch, and 102 fledged. The first returned in 2008, and in January 2009 the first cahow egg in more than 300 years was laid on the island. From 17 or 18 pairs in 1960, the population grew to 132 breeding pairs fledging 72 chicks in 2019, though it remains one of the rarest seabirds on Earth.