“The CahowCam 1 chick fledged on the night of the 28th of May at 1.45 am in the morning which was beautifully caught on the infrared Surface Cam that is set up here in Translocation Nesting Colony “A” on Nonsuch Island, in Bermuda.
When it first came out it still had a lot of the natal down that they're born with, and they really can't fly if their upper surfaces are still covered with it.
This chick had been exercising for about five nights but still had down on its head, on its upper surfaces, even a bit on its wings, and we just thought there's no way this chick is ready to fledge tonight.
Well, what happened was that, although it's been a dry period, we had a very hard rain shower that lasted a good hour and the chick basically sat out in the rain ... And the rain just beads and runs right off of the adult feathers but the down gets all matted.
And so it got all matted and waterlogged looking and then it went wandering off into the vegetation here at the colony site on Nonsuch and basically, the down getting wet helped it to come off easily, and the bird was obviously rubbing it off against the vegetation and probably preening it.
And when it appeared again on the camera about an hour or two later, it looked like a different bird.
It looked like a different chick.
All of the down had come off the head, the back, the upper surface of the wings, so all the flight surfaces were down-free.
It just had a lot of down still on its underside and that's fine.
They can fledge with it because as soon as they land on the water, it just will slough off anyway.
They can easily pull it off then.
So to our surprise, it did depart that same night at 1.4 in the morning, something that we captured clearly on the surface cam here on Nonsuch Island.”
As narrated by Jeremy Madeiros, Chief Terrestrial Conservation Officer, Nonsuch Island, Bermuda