In 1962, a conservationist moved to a near-barren Bermuda island without electricity or a phone; 47 years later, its first cahow chick in 300 years fledged

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.

Moving to a ghost island
Wingate did not study cahows from a distance. In 1962, he moved into a converted quarantine hospital on Nonsuch Island, the largest piece of land near the birds' nesting sites. According to The Bermudian Magazine's profile of Wingate, there was no telephone and no electricity when he arrived. He later admitted he "could hardly have dreamed of a greater paradise." At the time, Nonsuch was mostly bare rock and scrub. Centuries of farming, invasive species, and a stint as a quarantine station and reform school had wiped out nearly all its original plant life.

10,000 plants, one dream
Wingate planned to regrow Nonsuch's forest, species by species, until it resembled Bermuda before humans ever arrived. He planted more than 10,000 native seedlings on the island between 1962 and his retirement in 2000, as noted in the Nonsuch Expeditions' account of the six-decade restoration. According to Audubon magazine's feature on the project, the plantings included Bermuda cedar and olivewood, and Wingate chose Nonsuch partly because it sits higher above sea level than the crumbling islets where cahows were surviving, making it a safer bet as storms grew more severe.

A surprising American connection
This story has a US thread, too. Cahow eggshells were being thinned by DDT exposure, so Wingate flew to the United States to testify at congressional hearings that helped push through the American ban on the pesticide in 1972, the same fight remembered stateside for helping save the bald eagle.

The bird finally comes home
Rebuilding the forest solved only half the problem. The birds still needed safe places to nest, and their original islets were shrinking fast. So Wingate's successor, Jeremy Madeiros, began moving young cahow chicks from those eroding islets into new artificial burrows on Nonsuch. According to a peer-reviewed study published in Bird Conservation International, researchers translocated 104 near-fledged chicks to Nonsuch between 2004 and 2008, hand-feeding them fish and squid until they were ready to fly out to sea on their own. Cahows imprint on the place they fledge from and typically return there years later to breed.

The gamble worked. The same study reports that the first translocated birds came back to Nonsuch in February 2008. Then, in January 2009, one of those returning pairs laid an egg on the island, and the resulting chick fledged successfully that June, the first cahow born on Nonsuch Island in roughly 300 years.

Why this story matters right now
For anyone who assumes ecological damage can't be undone, this is worth sitting with. One person moved into total isolation, spent decades hand-planting a forest, and lived to see a bird once presumed extinct raise its young there again. The Bermuda Audubon Society notes that the cahow population has grown from those original 18 pairs to a record 156 breeding pairs as of the 2021-2022 season. Nonsuch itself is now managed as a "living museum," a working model of what the island looked like before people ever set foot on it.

It was not a quick fix, and nobody is pretending it was easy. But it is proof that ecological restoration is not just a theory in a textbook. It is something one determined person, later backed by scientists and a government program, helped make possible, one native plant and one nest box at a time.