Birds of Paradise Travel Video duration – 2.38 minutes Birds Eye View Nonsuch Island, Bermuda Travel Video Earth Calling - Ecology Heidi Hess Dive Instructor/Pilot There’s a really interesting story about this island down here which is called Nonsuch Island. It’s actually a nature preserve. What happened was, they took all the invasive species off the island. They collected the frogs, the toads and the buckheads and took everything off By hand, they picked them? By hand yes, anything that wasn’t native to the island and they repopulated it with native and endemic species. It was done a long time ago, yeah. It was all done by a man called David Wingate. Bermuda’s national bird is called the Cahow. There were hundreds of thousands of these birds around, when Bermuda was first settled in 1609. It’s one of the reasons why Bermuda was called the “Isle of the Devils” In addition to all the ship wrecks that we have, these birds made a very high pitched shrieking sound which sounded like women screaming, so as the ships would go by, the sailors would think that people were being tortured on the island. Then, when the “Sea Venture” wrecked here, and after they ate all the wild hogs, they turned to eating these birds and they just decimated the population of these birds within a few years. Then in 1930-1938, there was a bad storm. When everything cleared, they looked at the bottom of St. David’s lighthouse, and there was a dead cahow. So they knew that these birds were still around but they didn’t really know where they were. They traced them to these out islands, out here. They nest inside the cliffs. What they do is, they need a mother and a father in order to be viable. And after they’re hatched, they spend a few months inside their nests. On a clear night, they will come out. They’ll just spend hours, looking up at the night sky, imprinting the map of the stars on their brains. They will fly away, for five years, never to return. They do everything in flight, they never land. They eat, they mate, they sleep, they do everything in flight. And then, five years later, they will return to the same spot where they were born and lay their eggs and start a new family. That’s romantic. It is. It’s an incredible story. But what’s really incredible is that we were losing cahows. When David Wingate found, in the fifties I think it was, he found seventeen nesting populations left. And he said, if they had gotten down to ten, that they would have gone extinct. We wouldn’t have been able to bring them back. He has really dedicated his life to bringing these birds back.