Imagine giving up hot water, cell service, and every modern comfort to live alone on a small island barely bigger than a few city blocks. That is what a young conservationist named David Wingate did in 1962, moving to Bermuda's Nonsuch Island to rebuild its lost forest by hand. According to David B. Wingate's own written account of the project, published by Cambridge University Press, his goal was to recreate the island's pre-colonial habitat so a seabird believed extinct for centuries might one day nest there again. It took decades, but it worked.
For readers looking for a conservation success story, this is a notable one.
A bird everyone thought was gone
The cahow, or Bermuda petrel, is a small gray seabird that nests underground and only comes ashore in the dark. European sailors and the rats, cats, and pigs they brought hunted the bird to what looked like extinction by the 1620s. According to Nonsuch Expeditions, the organization behind Bermuda's ongoing cahow recovery program, a search team found just 18 surviving breeding pairs nesting on tiny, rarely visited rocky islets in 1951. The Royal Gazette, Bermuda's national newspaper, notes that one member of that team was David Wingate, then just 15 years old. The discovery became his life's work.
