The Bermuda petrel Pterodroma cahow or cahow — is a medium-sized, seagoing bird which nests only in the Bermuda archipelago and spends almost all of its life at sea.

About the size of a pigeon and with notably long wings, the cahow is a brownish-grey and white gadfly petrel, with grey on the crown, nape and face that extends unbroken down the sides of the neck in a cowl.

The Bermuda petrel also typically has a narrower white collar and less white on the rump than other tubenose petrels.

It returns to land nocturnally to lay one egg and, before sunrise, flies off to find fish and marine invertebrates.

Blessed with relatively large wings compared to the rest of its body, it is an expert glider and diver and is thought to range up to half a million square miles from the Lucayan seamount (Bahamas and the Turks & Caicos Islands) up the eastern seaboard of North America and across to the seas off western Ireland and Cornwall and south towards the Azores.

While it certainly skirts the land masses during its travels, it is believed to intentionally land only in Bermuda.

There are confirmed records of sightings off the coast of North Carolina, Virginia and Massachusetts.

A cahow was identified in the Azores in 2002, 2003 and in 2006.

In 1503, Bermuda was terra incognita, and with discovery by Iberian sailors, the cahow was unused to humans and did not avoid contact.

In 1603, Venturilla, “the Negro”, may have been enslaved on Spanish conquistador Diego Ramirez’s ship when it struck a reef on the north side of the reefline.

Ramirez successfully got over the boilers and the ship made its way to what is now Spanish Point. Venturilla was sent ashore and soon Ramirez and the rest of the crew heard a commotion and his shouts.

The birds, which had survived millennia undisturbed, were so tame they would settle on a man’s head and shoulders, oblivious to the danger.

This bewildered Venturilla and his shipmates, who had never seen such peaceful birds in the Old World.

With English settlement, the cahow proved irresistible: its numbers dropped from an estimated 1 million to virtual disappearance by the 1620s.

Early settlers lived off cahow meat — until 1616, when a Somers Isle Company proclamation banned “the spoyle and havocke of the cahowes”.

The surviving cahow had held on for more than three centuries on the smaller Castle Islands, in some of the roughest waters around the Bermudian archipelago.

Over centuries, the birds faced numerous threats — predators, such as rats and dogs introduced by settlers, and aggressive attacks from fellow birds pressured by their own loss of habitat, particularly from the longtail, which also nests in burrows.

Another threat was the invasive cane toad, with its poisonous glands, introduced from Suriname in the previous century to control cockroaches.

During the 20th century, pesticides legal both in Bermuda and on the nearby United States military base certainly had a role in reducing the bird’s numbers.

For about a century before its rediscovery, naturalists, both amateur and professional, had considered the possibility that the cahow had survived.

Some noted reports from St David’s Island fishermen, who had occasionally spotted a shy, nocturnal “Christmas bird”, without ever catching one, and from fishermen of Azorean descent who could mimic a mysterious bird’s distinctive “cahow” call, without ever seeing it.

In the wake of two world wars, the scientific community had thrown its weight behind finding what appeared to be obvious: the cahow could very much be alive in the smaller islands and islets of the East End.

Before he had reached puberty, David Wingate was already a keen birder. He wrote in a notebook that it was his goal to “identify the cahow bird”.

The first “rediscovery”, according to former British soldier John Taverner Bartram, was by former captains Orde and MacLeod of the Black Watch Regiment, who found bones on Black Rock in May 1849 of what they called Puffinus obscurus, which “Mr Hurdis esqr the late controller of custome” believed to be a cahow.

On May 27, 1862, Bartram took several Tucker’s Town men to Castle Roads, particularly Pear Island, where they found the remains of what was presumed to be a cahow.

The next brush with the cahow appears to be by Louis Mowbray Sr in February 20, 1906, but the remains were not identified until many years later, because the common assumption was that the cahow and “the pimlico” were one and the same.

The pimlico, formerly the Audubon’s shearwater but now called the Sargasso shearwater Puffinus lherminieri, also nested in Bermuda and the existence of the two seabirds, similar in size, complicated the identification.

In 1935, a juvenile cahow slammed into St David’s Lighthouse and its remains were identified by the famed deep sea oceanographer William Beebe, who took it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

In 1941, a cahow was captured alive after it hit a radio tower in St George’s. It was banded and later released.

On March 14, 1945, Samuel Ristich was working as a navigator with the US Army Air Corps on Cooper’s Island when he came across bird remains on a beach.

“Each morning I’d run for about an hour and it was on one of these mornings that I found this bird that had been freshly killed,” he explained to The Royal Gazette in 1997. “So my friend and I stuffed it.”

A week later he found bird bones subsequently identified as cahow bones.

He took his stuffed bird to the Smithsonian, where it was positively identified as a cahow.

“I went to see [seabird expert] Robert Cushman Murphy at the museum in New York City and told him that we had a bird that was identified to be the missing cahow,” he said.

“He didn’t believe me so he never came down but in 1951 he came down to Bermuda and found five living birds.”

Mr Wingate was invited to join the grand expedition by Louis Mowbray Jr, the director of the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo, and Dr Murphy, of the American Museum of Natural History.

In announcing his discovery, Dr Murphy told the Gazette: “I have been interested in seabirds for many years and have travelled many miles with my wife, studying their life history and biology.

“For a long time I have been familiar with the history of the cahow and have heard from various people rumours of its remains having been found.

“For some considerable time I have had the idea that the bird was still in Bermuda. Petrels are persistent and continue to come back to their nesting grounds.

“This is remarkable when you consider how brightly lit is Bermuda and how busy the skies are with planes.

“The cahow is a winter-nesting petrel, the only one in the northern hemisphere, although there are many types in the southern hemisphere.

“Funds were offered to my museum to enable me to come here by Childs Frick, of Castle Point [the easternmost tip of Tucker’s Town] and the Pan-American Section of the International Committee for the Preservation of Bird Life.”

The team apparently made several trips to the Castle Islands after Dr Murphy and his wife, Grace, arrived on January 23.

Dr Murphy described the moment: “We worked for about two-and-a-half hours and had harpoons made of bamboo.

“The cahow must apparently have soft soil or disintegrated powdered rock in which to burrow. From the end of the rock crevice they dig into soft soil and make tremendously long burrows.

“We could see by crawling three or four feet into the rock crevice and then turning our flashlights on that there was a petrel in it. I suspected right away that it was a cahow.”

“It is a bird that saved the lives of the earliest colonists and is supposed to have been gone for centuries,” Dr Murphy said.

He added: “It is an asset that is worth saving and protecting.”

It was Mr Wingate who established the grand ritual of the cahow’s first attempt at flight and that it spends years at sea before clumsily returning to Castle Roads to find an empty, safe and dark burrow to mate and lay eggs.

Under the stewardship of Mr Wingate and his successor as the Bermuda Government’s conservation officer, Jeremy Madeiros, the population has increased from 18 nesting pairs in 1951 to 172 breeding pairs in 2024, producing a total of 76 fledgelings. At that count, there were 39 pairs and 25 fledgelings in that count.

The cahow is listed as “endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

A foraging trip to feed a chick can encompass 3,000 miles of flight, hunting for fish over millions of square miles of the Northern Atlantic.

The cahow pairs begin to return to Bermuda in the autumn months — hence the sightings of “the Christmas bird” — and they mate in January and February.

In 2026, the first cahows were seen early, in the middle of October.

It was Mr Wingate who deduced that the project would be advanced by the creation of a burrow by digging out a tunnel and sleeping chamber and covering it by a concrete dome with an observation hole.

He, too, deduced that the Mowbray-Murphy expedition had come at the most critical time in the bird’s natural history — in his words, by the 1950s, the remaining clutch of birds faced “final extinction”.

The cahow was threatened by the more aggressive longtail.

While the adults rarely encounter the other species, the larger longtail will kill the cahow. But their internal clocks make that rare — the cahow is nocturnal.

Mr Wingate argued that longtails, which are not protected by law, would have to be killed and he further developed the wooden baffles, suggested by the US naturalist David Pough, which allow the cahows to pass, but block longtails.

In the weeks that followed discovery, four nesting pairs lost their eggs and the one successful hatchling was lost to a longtail attack.

It was clear: the Lazarus species would have to be protected.

Under Mr Wingate’s careful guidance, by the 1990s Nonsuch Island had been transformed; the former quarantine facility and reform school building was now on the electrical grid.

He and numerous workmen from the parks and works and engineering departments had worked diligently to return it to how it might have looked before 1503, not least of which was the creation of freshwater and salt marsh ponds, secured by large berms.

Over the years, Mr Wingate oversaw the planting of more than 18,000 endemic and native plants, eradicated domestic cats, dogs and rats, and removed non-native plants.

The list of flora and fauna reintroduced on Nonsuch amounts to dozens upon dozens.

Once released from the threat of introduced predators found on the mainland, all have thrived.

It is common for the reintroduced yellow-crowned night heron Nyctanassa violacea to be seen feasting on crabs, or watch migrant birds rest before returning to their travels.

It is not uncommon to see an endemic white-eyed vireo (or chick of the village) perch from Bermuda cedar and the Bermuda olivewood, overlooking the Bermuda sedge, or see a Bermuda rock skink, a West Indian top shell or land hermit crabs scurry about.

Endemic Bermuda killifish swim in ponds, safe from invasive terrapins.

The green sea turtle, eastern bluebird and the yellowwood tree have all flourished thanks to conservation.

Over the decades, Mr Wingate spent countless hours giving lectures in public and private schools and to churches and civic groups island-wide.

During his tenure as conservation officer and in retirement, he inspected and advised on new developments and crusaded for greater measures to protect the environment in general.

Respected but seemingly cursed with a certainty and directness that often meant he butted heads within the Government and business sectors, Mr Wingate was tireless in advocating for endangered and other wildlife, such as the common tern, which — owing to his research — is believed to have a Bermudian subspecies.

He was key to the “rescue” of sea turtles — which were once abundant in local waters before settlement but were wiped out through overfishing by the 1800s.

The Bermuda Turtle Project was initiated in 1968 by H. Clay Frick II, trustee of the Sea Turtle Conservancy, in co-operation with the Bermuda Government.

More than 25,000 green turtle eggs were transplanted from Costa Rica in the 1960s and 1970s by the Sea Turtle Conservancy and buried on beaches in Bermuda.

Nonsuch’s rehabilitation and a ban on turtle fishing, beginning in 1973, led to the first evidence of nesting activity being seen in 1990, and not just on Nonsuch.

Since 1991, the project has been under the direction of the BAMZ, in collaboration with the Sea Turtle Conservancy, and the Bermuda Zoological Society.

It was Mr Wingate who collected the last two examples of an introduced whistling frog, Eleutherodactylus gossei from Paget Marsh in 1994. While it is an invasive, its decline is indicative of change over time of the Bermuda environment.

The South American cane toad and the other whistling frog, the Lesser Antillean whistling frog Eleutherodactylus johnstonei, are now rare to spot and scientists have noted a rise in frog and toad deformities.

Despite this, the E. johnstonei’s distinctive call still dominates the island’s night-time hours.

Along the way, there were controversies.

An expert shot, Mr Wingate was not above shooting the occasional predatory birds that reached our shores, such as peregrine falcons or snowy owls. The birds pose catastrophic threats to the cahow.

When the Department of Agriculture recommended importing the great kiskadee Pitangus sulphuratus from Trinidad & Tobago in 1957 to control the introduced West Indian anole lizard, Mr Wingate “vehemently” opposed the introduction, “on the basis that most island introductions — especially of omnivores that are unpredictable in the effect — were a disaster”.

The kiskadee did not make a dent in the anole population, but targeted white-eyed vireo, catbirds, bluebirds and cardinals, skinks and the Bermuda cicada Neotibicen bermudianus, which is now extinct from predation, development and the cedar blight.

By the early 2000s, Dr Medeiros had reintroduced the cahow to Nonsuch.

The birds had previously nested in the smaller out islands in Castle Roads and in 2009, the first breeding pair occupied a nest burrow and produced a chick, which became the first naturally hatching cahow on that island since at least the 1620s.