Bermuda Petrel

The tubenose

Published measurements include mass about 355.

It described incubation behavior of this species.

Range and habitat

All nesting and nearby islands are strictly protected as part of the Castle Islands Nature Reserve, and landing by the public is prohibited except by special permission in the company of the conservation officer. In addition, there is an ongoing management program to eradicate non-native invasive plant species on all of the reserve islands, coupled with plantings of native and endemic plant species, many of that are also endangered. Several of the nesting islands are also the subject of an ecological restoration project, to restore them as examples of the terrestrial plant and animal communities once found on, but now largely lost from, the rest of Bermuda.

A national programme to preserve the bird and restore the species has helped increase its numbers, but scientists are still working to enlarge its nesting habitat on the restored Nonsuch Island. He undertook work to address various threats to the Bermuda petrel, among them the eradication of introduced rats on the nesting islands and nearby islands, and addressed nest-site competition with the more aggressive, native white-tailed tropicbird Phaethon lepturus catsbyii, that invaded petrel nest burrows and killed up to 75% of all chicks.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Cahows typically eat small fish, squid and shrimp-like crustaceans. Geolocator studies carried out between 2009 and 2011 confirmed that they primarily forage in two widely separated locations during the non-breeding season (July to October), between Bermuda, Nova Scotia and North Carolina, and to the north and northwest of the Azores archipelago.

The cahow is a slow breeder, but excellent flier. It visits land only to nest and spends most its adult life on the open seas ranging from the North Atlantic coastal United States and Canada to waters off western Europe.

In crisis

For 300 years, it was thought to be extinct. The dramatic rediscovery in 1951 of eighteen nesting pairs made this a "Lazarus species", that is, a species found to be alive after having been considered extinct. In total, almost 10,000 individual native and endemic plants of over 100 species were planted on Nonsuch starting in 1962, and have since developed into a well-established closed-canopy forest, similar to early accounts of what was found on Bermuda by the earliest settlers in the 1600s.

A banding program for both fledgling and adult petrels was initiated in 2002, and by 2015 had resulted in over 85% of all Bermuda petrels being fitted with identification bands, enabling positive identification of individual birds through their breeding lifespan. Even though the Bermuda petrel's population has explicitly increased and it is projected that the population will double every 22 years, there are still clear-cut inhibitors on its path to recovery.

Bermuda Petrel is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Bermuda Petrel, Wikidata item Q203590. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.