Bermuda's Born-Again Petrels
Conservationists are racing to build up new populations of this island's national bird, once believed extinct for nearly 400 years
01-14-2013 // Michael Lipske
EXTINCTION IS FOREVER, RIGHT? As in gone, dead, kaput. Thank goodness no one told the once-vanished Bermuda petrel.
Not that the seabird’s disappearing act was unconvincing. First encountered by Spanish sailors in the 1500s, the mariners thought the bird’s eerie, nighttime courtship calls were the shrieks of devils. The petrels then may have numbered as many as half a million birds, all native to the Bermuda Islands, now a British territory in the Atlantic Ocean about 650 miles east of North Carolina.
After that maiden contact with European seafarers, it was downhill for the bird. Pigs,unloaded on Bermuda as food for shipwrecked Spanish sailors, quickly destroyed most of the petrel population, rooting up their underground nests and eating eggs, chicks and even adults. When English colonists arrived in 1609, they brought the petrel a new name—cahow—suggestive of the bird’s nocturnal cry. They also brought dogs, cats and rats that feasted on the remaining petrels. By the 1620s, the cahow had gone extinct. Or so it seemed.
Then a lone petrel turned up on the island in 1906, and others in 1935 and 1941. Scientists soon launched a search for the species’ Bermuda nesting habitat. In 1951, they found 17 nesting pairs, producing a total of only seven or eight chicks yearly, hunkered down on four rocky islets in Castle Harbor. ...
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