Subtitled: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back From Extinction. The man is David Wingate and the tale is his passion for protecting and restoring the native flora and fauna of Bermuda, especially the Bermuda Petrel.
The Bermuda Petrel is known locally as the cahow. It was never extinct of course but nearly so. It is not a user-friendly bird as it loves dark and stormy nights, nests in odd burrows, is small and out at sea for much of the year, flying tens of thousands of miles over open water as petrels do.
This is a wonderful book, not only about the cahow, but also about Bermuda and its island topography, its history and climate, animal predation and introduced species (often with unexpected, undesirable consequences), shipwrecks and hurricanes and idyllic periods of time living on Nonsuch with family and summer friends and few amenities.
"By the time Wingate returned from school, the unoccupied buildings had been written off by the government and were close to ruin, ransacked by vandals and stripped of their fixtures, and even the cottage was in disrepair. Literally all but one of the two-thousand-plus cedars on the island were dead, making it appear from the water like a giant floating wire hairbrush. The understory had been shaved to nothing by overgrazing and, without the cover of trees to protect it, swept away by gales. Even the migratory and land birds had disappeared, heightening the sense of lifelessness. But when Wingate looked at Nonsuch, he saw another world."
And at the end of the book: "With every one of the thousands of trees he planted, Wingate pictured cahows some day burrowing under its roots....To an outsider, the island's apparent wildness would be impossible to square with the idea of one man meticulously hand-planting every tree and shrub."
A year ago, in November of 2011, Wingate, now in his late 70s and regrettably (to him) no longer in charge of the project which will be forever a part of his heart and soul, was given the opportunity to do a "night watch" out on Nonsuch....He was "mesmerized...He and Madeiros called to the birds, and four subadults began to take an interest in them, fluttering and hovering over the men's heads before pairing off again and then zipping away. Eventually, one of the four dropped out of the sky and landed between Wingate and Madeiros, close enough that the younger man could easily have reached out and picked the bird up...."
His daughter Karen remembers that "Whenever Dad had to come to something at school, my sister and I would be in agony. We knew he'd be late. And if he comes, what will he be wearing? Ripped shorts and a shirt covered in bird poop? He was always scruffy with his hands bleeding and burrs clinging to him, because he'd be off in the bushes after a bird."
A husband and a father and a man who loved cahows...this is his story.
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