While Lyle is finding the original Bermuda Skink emails....
I found this tangential mention of the Bermuda skink....in an article on he
rediscovery and preservation of the Cahow......a Bermudan bird...
Nathan
David Wingate Returns Cahows
From 'Extinction,' Houses Them
By IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
NONSUCH ISLAND, Bermuda -- When David Wingate was a boy, other kids taunted
him, he says, because he had a sharp, beaklike nose -- and because he loved
birds. They called him "Bird."
But as a lanky 15-year-old in 1951, he became an overnight hero. While
crawling around a rocky islet, he and two scientists made a discovery that
shocked conservationists throughout the world. From a deep, dark crevice,
they lured out a cahow, a nocturnal seabird thought to have died out in the
17th century.
"I determined right then and there that I was going to be the guy who
brought the cahow back from extinction," says Mr. Wingate, racing his
motorboat across a choppy harbor to the historic spot where the bird was found.
For 50 years, Mr. Wingate has made nests, nursed sick birds, shot predators
and battled developers to increase numbers of this bird unique to Bermuda
-- from just a handful to more than 200. As Bermuda's first chief
conservation officer, Mr. Wingate moved onto a 15-acre desert island called
Nonsuch, 1,500 feet from the main island and turned it into a "prehistoric"
breeding oasis.
The odds were against him. The cahow, also known as the Bermuda petrel,
lays just one egg a year -- and only half of its eggs yield fledglings.
Survivors were often killed by tropic birds competing for their nests.
Few North American birds have become extinct, ornithologists say. "The
cahow is the only one that was rediscovered and propelled back," says
Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation biology at Columbia University in
New York. "It was hanging on by its fingernails."
The bird got quite a welcome. Its black-and-white body and four-foot
wingspan was planted on the Bermuda $10 bill. Bermuda's National Parks
Department adopted it as its logo. But few have ever actually seen the bird
itself. It spends most of its life out at sea, returning to small islets on
stormy winter nights. "We all just take Wingate's word that the bird
exists," jokes Tim Hodgson, editor of the weekly Mid-Ocean News.
But Mr. Wingate gave actress Jane Alexander, a bird buff, the rare
opportunity to see a nesting cahow chick in 1997. "It was the most stunning
sight," she says. "Imagine an old-fashioned gray flecked powder puff. I get
chills just thinking about that bird."
Now retired, Mr. Wingate, 65 years old, has shaken the name "Bird," but not
the oddball image. His current wife, Helguth, thought he was a spy when she
first spotted him in the 1960s -- in her bushes with binoculars. (He was
chasing a yellow-billed cuckoo.) "He's an eccentric with a real mission,"
says Jack Ward, curator of the Bermuda Aquarium, where some of Mr.
Wingate's sick and injured birds have been nursed back to health.
One day recently, Mr. Wingate docked his boat, a Boston Whaler, and he
bounded onto Nonsuch. The island, named after a Tudor castle in England, is
an ancient sand dune in Castle Harbor, off Bermuda's east end. It has
served as a yellow-fever quarantine hospital, a reform school for boys and
a marine laboratory for naturalist William Beebe.
Bermuda Cahow in flight
When Mr. Wingate moved here in 1962, Nonsuch had been stripped of
vegetation by goats, and nearly all of its cedar forest had been killed off
by disease. Mr. Wingate, as one of his goals, wanted to restore his little
island to what Bermuda itself had been before settlers came and introduced
lush plants and animals from other parts of the world.
With a zoology degree from Cornell University, Mr. Wingate had taken over
the cahow project from Louis S. Mowbry, one of the scientists who had let
him tag along when they made the historic discovery. (The other was Robert
Cushman Murphy, the bird curator at the American Museum of Natural History
in New York.) Mr. Wingate, a Bermuda native, raised three daughters on
Nonsuch and buried his first wife here.
He ripped out everything and drove out immigrant rats and poisonous toads.
He planted 10,000 indigenous trees and shrubs (leaving out poison ivy, also
native to the island) The goal: to return to the cahows a paradise whose
only four-legged creature was a rock lizard, or skink. When explorers
arrived in Bermuda in the late 1500s, cahows burrowed into the sand by day,
came out by the thousands at night, shrieking a sound that Mr. Wingate
likes to imitate: "Ooooooh. Eek eek," he sings from the porch of the former
yellow-fever hospital.
Explorers thought the birds were evil spirits and named Bermuda "Devil's
Islands." Early settlers lived off cahow meat -- until 1616, when a
government proclamation banned "the spoyle and havocke of the cahowes."
Rats and hogs continued to feast on cahows, joined by dogs and cats,
brought in to kill the rats.
The birds took refuge at sea, returning only to lay eggs. They left their
chicks at the mercy of elegant long-tailed tropic birds -- until Mr.
Wingate came along. He covered nests with bafflers, boards with holes large
enough for the cahow, but too small for its predators.
The project hummed along until the late 1960s, when the insecticide DDT
arrived from the U.S., 600 miles away, in the form of rain. Mr. Wingate
flew to Pennsylvania to testify that the chemical made the cahow's
eggshells frail.
The pesticide was subsequently outlawed in the U.S., but other threats
loomed. After discovering five dead cahows in the late 1980s, Mr. Wingate
borrowed a sharpshooter from Bermuda's military and tracked down the killer
-- a rare snowy owl. The sharpshooter missed. So, Mr. Wingate -- one of
only three Bermudians allowed by the government to carry a gun to control
pests -- killed the owl himself. "I was just the next level in the predator
chain," he told horrified critics.
On Bermuda itself, he has fought development -- at public forums and in the
press. "He has protected many sections of Bermuda from concrete," says
Penny Hill, secretary of the Audubon Society.
In the early 1990s, he foiled a plan to extend Bermuda's national
equestrian center, which would have meant clearing trees from a hillside.
Recently, he lost a fight against expanding a rock quarry. Both were
projects of David Summers, Bermuda's biggest developer. "David Wingate's
objectives are to conserve Bermuda as it was before mankind inhabited it,"
he says. "Man is here, and he needs accommodation."
But Mr. Wingate carries on. A potential new hurdle: Human curiosity. At the
urging of a tourist industry in decline, Mr. Wingate agreed in November to
allow 25 people a week onto the island, at $75 each. "If you want public
support for conservation," he reasons, "you have to let the public enjoy
what you've preserved."
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