A Bermudian scientist’s dedication to saving the rare seabirds of Hawaii in one of the wettest places in the world has earned him the title of 2015 Recovery Champion.

André Raine’s accolade from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is all the more remarkable for coming a year after his uncle, Anthony Amos, took the same distinction.

The award was bestowed on Dr Raine and his team at a ceremony last week in the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge, a setting appropriately surrounded by native Hawaiian seabirds. Project manager for the Kauai Endangered Seabird Recovery Project, Dr Raine and his colleagues focus on three threatened species on the island: the Newell’s Shearwater, Hawaiian Petrel and Band-rumped Storm-petrel.

“Like our own Bermuda cahow, these extremely rare seabirds face a whole raft of threats — from predation by introduced mammals like cats and pigs, to collisions with power lines, the affects of light attraction on newly fledged birds and threats at sea such as overfishing, marine pollution and the larger impacts of climate change,” said Dr Raine, author of the Field Guide to the Birds of Bermuda.

“They are a very challenging set of species to work with as the breed in remote mountainous areas of the island, areas that are often wet and raining, and in dense forests where they nest under native trees and in beds of native ferns.”

In a pioneering project, the conservation team spends long nights camped in remote and unforgiving terrain, monitoring the little-understood birds.

“It’s a great feeling to be given the award, as it is only awarded to a small number of individuals and organisations every year in the whole of the US,” he said. Dr Raine added: “My family was also present — it’s always nice to have the next generation of conservationists at an event like that.”