During World ReWilding week, we released the first health check video for our latest CahowCam chick, one of the rarest seabirds on the Planet.
It hatched on March 9th, in Translocation Colony “A” on Nonsuch Island in Bermuda, the world-renowned, 16 Acre Nature Reserve that is now 65 years into a 100 year re-wilding process, and this video was filmed when it less than a day old…
The Cahows are a “lazarus species” thought extinct for over 300 years, which are now re-populating Nonsuch Island where they had not been seen since the 1600’s. This has been enabled by the ground-breaking Translocation Project that started 20 years ago, and is a major part of the ongoing re-wilding process, bringing the island back to a pre-colonozation state.
Our star is this year’s chick from nesting burrow #832, from which one of the CahowCams has been live-streaming for the past 15 years, and in this video he gets his first health check.
The CahowCam LiveSteams that are monitored 24/7 by the Nonsuch Expeditions, DENR and dedicated Cam volunteers, are allowing us to observe and log intimate behaviors that would otherwise be impossible. This includes nest activities around the time of this chick’s conception which raise paternity questions, which we have been studying with our partners BioQuest, and will be the subject of a future post. Similarly some of the Cahows seen in the nest over the past few nights, are acting in ways that indicated that they may not in fact be the parents, stay tuned for updates.