Published: October 24, 2009 04:08 pm      

Birding with Jerry Hall: Scratching that oceanic itch in Bermuda

I am overdue for a visit to the ocean this year. The beach house we usually frequent at Surfside was put out of commission by Hurricane Ike and I haven’t managed a trip to Galveston, Corpus Christi or Port Aransas despite the best of intentions.

My soul hungers for foam-flecked waves, firm beach sand and the piercing cry of seagulls.

Fortunately, I will soon be off to Bermuda, a semi-tropical, fishhook-shaped atoll surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Famed for pink sand beaches, dark blue depths and sparkling turquoise shallows, I think it will more than suffice to scratch my oceanic itch.

And it has a most interesting petrel that I would love to see, one which is Bermuda’s national bird, is limited to some 250 breeding pairs and which is said to have an eerie, moaning cry.

That bird is the cahow. Also called the Bermuda petrel.

One of the few birds completely unique to Bermuda, nesting nowhere else on earth, the cahow is also one of the rarest seabirds on earth. For hundreds of years, it was thought to be extinct and was re-discovered on rocky islands on the east end of Bermuda in 1951. One of those making the discovery was a 15-year-old boy, David Wingate.

That same David Wingate was one of the happy people who recently celebrated a major step in the bird’s recovery after the hatching this spring of the first cahow chick born on Nonsuch Island in some 400 years. A project to make this island a breeding ground for cahows was begun in 2004 with construction of artificial concrete burrows designed especially for cahows.

“I cannot think of a more perfect success story appropriate to the 400th anniversary of Bermuda, as the cahow practically saved the early settlers but then they almost became extinct because of them,” said Wingate, who spent his working years as a conservation officer working to save the endangered bird.

Once numbering in the hundreds of thousands, the cahow was thought to have gone extinct in the 1620s after the early settlers devoured the birds and eventually introduced pigs, dogs, cats and rats to the islands. All these new predators drove the cahow to the brink of extinction.

The cahow story reminds me of the ivory-billed woodpecker, another bird believed to be extinct which was thought to have been re-discovered in Arkansas a few years back. Unfortunately, no new sightings have been made and it seems likely the bird is indeed gone from the earth.

So it will be good to board a ship and go forth to look for the cahow. It spends its life at sea but bird pairs return to Bermuda starting in late October to breed and raise a single chick. The chances are slim we will actually see one of the handsome birds, who feature a blackish-gray head and a white belly.

But it will be fun to try.

And we will get to meet David Wingate, surely a hero in the world of bird conservation. Along with becoming re-acquainted with the wonders of the ocean, I very much look forward to meeting the man who saved the cahow.