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Heidi: There’s a really interesting story about the silence down here which is called none such island. It’s actually a nature preserved. What happened was they took all the invasions species off the island. They collected the frogs and toads and buckets and took everything off…
Female 1: By hand?
Heidi: by hand, yeap. Everything that wasn’t made of to the island, and they repopulated it with native and endemic species. It was a long time ago.
Female 1: ok.
Heidi: Yeah. It was all done by a man called David Wingate. Bermuda’s national bird is called the kahaw. There are hundreds of thousands of this birds around when Bermuda was first settled in 1609. It’s one of the reasons why Bermuda was called the isle of the devils and addition to all the shipwrecks that we have, these birds made a very high pitch shrieking sound, which sounded like women screaming.
Female 1: oh.
Heidi: So as the ships would go by the sailor would think that the people were being tortured on the island. Then when they see a bunch of wreck here and after they ate the wild hogs, they turn to eat this birds and they just decimate them that the population of this birds in a few years. Then in 1930, 1938 there was a bad storm when everything cleared, they look at the bottom of St. David’s lighthouse and there’s a dead kahaw so they knew that this birds are still around but they didn’t really know where they were. They trace them to this out islands out here; they nest some inside the cliffs. What they do is they need a mother and a father in order to be viable and after their hatch they spend a few months inside their nest. On a clear night they will come out they will just spend hours looking up in the night’s sky imprinting the map of the stars on their brain and they will fly away for 5 years and never to return. They do everything in flight, they never land, they eat, they sleep into everything in place and then 5 years later they will return to the same spot where they were born and lay their eggs to start a new family.
Female 1: That’s romantic.
Heidi: It is. It’s an incredible story but what’s really incredible is that when we were losing kahaw’s and David Wingate found in the 50’s, I think it was, he found 17 nesting populations left and he said if they’ve gotten down to 10 that they would have come gone instinct that he would able to put the back, his really dedicated to his life to bring this birds back.
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