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Cahow chick filmed breaking out of egg

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The 18 hours old cahow chick (Photo by Nonsuch Expeditions)
Cahow egg pipping (Photo by Nonsuch Expeditions)

Birdwatchers will be able to follow the first days of a cahow chick after it was filmed hatching.

The process started on Monday night when the chick was heard to make “peeps” from inside the egg and it emerged on Tuesday.

Jeremy Madeiros, the chief terrestrial conservation officer at the Department of Environment & Natural Resources, said: “Upon checking the CahowCam 2 nest, I was able to confirm that hatching was well under way, with the chick already having pipped the first hole through the shell.

“There was also good news in that the female cahow, only recently having taken over egg incubation duties from the male bird, who had carried out a ten-day incubation shift, still was at a good weight, meaning that she would still have good food reserves to feed the chick once it had hatched.”

The nest is one of two burrows on Nonsuch Island equipped with ’Cahow Cam’ high-definition cameras providing continuous live streaming.

Mr Madeiros carried out a survey of the site’s nests on Tuesday.

He said: “The hatching process with a cahow is lengthy and exhausting for the chick, which can take up to 36 hours to break out of the shell.

“This process can sometimes be fatal for the chick, and every year we lose one or two chicks which die while hatching. As a result, we are always anxious during the lengthy chick hatch period.

“By 8.40pm the chick looked like it had successfully hatched, but for several hours we did not have a good look at it.

“The protective mother covered it and kept it warm until the chick's warm fur-like down had dried and it assumed its familiar fuzzball appearance.”

Mr Madeiros added: “I was very relieved to see the chick receiving a good long first feed from its mother between 3.10am and 3.24am, and again just after 9am yesterday.”

The hatching of the chick brought the number of chicks on Nonsuch Island and four other nest islands to 56.

This is the ninth season that LookBermuda’s Nonsuch Expeditions CahowCam Project, with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Department of the Environment & Natural Resources has been streaming live HD video from the underground Bermuda petrel nesting burrows.

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Published March 11, 2021 at 4:13 pm (Updated March 12, 2021 at 8:29 am)

Cahow chick filmed breaking out of egg

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