Book Review:
Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man who Brought It Back from Extinction by Elizabeth Gehrman
Crazy, eccentric curmudgeon or self-sacrificing saint? David Wingate, who almost single-handedly resurrected the near-extinct cahow, a type of petrel, is both. The Bermuda native has devoted his life to assuring the survival of a creature once so docile, abundant, and unfortunately for them, delicious, that early visitors to Bermuda, standing in one spot, easily killed four thousand in a single night.
Gehrman’s fascinating and thoroughly researched account describes how Wingate frequently risked his life on the tiny, jagged islands that compose Bermuda, fighting rough seas, hurricanes, rocky shores, and even the U.S. military, to study the cahow, long thought to be extinct. Wingate constructed artificial burrows, warded off predators, and replanted vegetation by hand, all in the name of reviving a species that was nearly wiped out in the early 1600s.
As a teenage birder in 1951, Wingate was present when American ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy and Louis S. Mowbray of the Bermuda Aquarium discovered the first living cahow seen in 330 years, on a tiny islet called Inner Pear. At that point Wingate was hooked and became determined to restore the cahow to Bermuda, no matter what the cost. Personal discomfort meant little to him. He often spent cold, wet nights without shelter on uninhabited islands, studying the nocturnal seabirds, trying to figure out how to turn 14 birds into a viable population.
After earning a degree in zoology from Cornell University in 1957, Wingate returned home to tackle the problem of helping the cahow survive by creating devices that prevented other types of birds from getting into the cahows’ burrows. Along with their revival, Wingate came up with the idea of restoring an abandoned island called Nonsuch to its precolonial state, including, he hoped, breeding grounds for the cahow. In 1962, Wingate, his pregnant wife Anita, and their toddler moved to the island, which had few modern conveniences, making daily living quite a challenge.
There was as yet no dock at the protected north beach, so everything the young family needed – furniture, tools, books, food, clothing, and diapers; blocks of ice, since there was no refrigerator; lanterns, since there was no electricity; eighty-pound propane cylinders to fuel the stove; five-gallon cans of gas for the generator that started the pressure system to pump rainwater from the cistern to the house – had to be dragged over the beach, past the bones of cedars, through the scrub, and to the compound, three hundred yards away and uphill every step.
Wingate stuck it out on the island, hand-planting native habitat and destroying invasive species, despite horrific family tragedy and inane government bureaucracy, until finally forced to retire and leave Nonsuch in 2000. By then, three times as many breeding cahows and three times as many fledglings existed on various islets in Bermuda versus when Wingate began his work in 1962. However, he had yet to see them return to nest on Nonsuch. Finally, on a rare night visit to the island in 2011, Wingate saw about 10 cahows fluttering above him, a thrilling culmination to his astounding life’s work.
This review originally appeared in the bimonthly newspaper Happy Valley Animals.