Cahow project: Jeremy dotes like a father as he describes new behaviours

The Bermuda Sun's Sarah Lagan joined the Cahow Recovery Project's Jeremy Madeiros and LookBermuda's J-P Rouja on a trip to Nonsuch to see the new Cahow Cams in action.

As we huddled in the shade of  a black blanket on a sun-baked cliff on Nonsuch Island, an iPad screen revealed the activities of a tiny cahow chick that lay just a few inches beneath our feet in its underground burrow.

Under the gaze of an intricately designed infrared camera fixed inside its dark nest, the little grey mound of fluff shuffled around, twitched its beak and seemed to make quite an effort to get itself perfectly comfortable.

These are among the first images of these critically endangered seabirds going about their business completely undisturbed by man. This is thanks to LookBermuda’s J-P Rouja who has spent the past two years designing and building the custom filming and lighting equipment. Joining us on the trip to Nonsuch, J-P spent a little while fiddling with the camera before slotting it into the concrete lid of the nest to capture the images we were watching in real time.

Jeremy Madeiros of the Cahow Recovery Project started telling me about the first footage he saw of a nested cahow chick displaying its natural behaviour just a few weeks ago and he resembles a father recalling new milestones in his children’s lives.

Since taking over the cahow project from David Wingate in 2000, Jeremy has spent every moment of his hard-working life housing, feeding, measuring, weighing, protecting and loving these little “fuzzballs”. And like any proud father, he happily recalls every new development he has been able to observe.

“When it was less than a week of age we saw things like the chick gathering nest material and building it up around the burrow it was sitting in. It was practising nest building — it was playing house I guess you could say.”

Despite spending so much time with Bermuda’s national bird, he is seeing, for the first time, behaviours that he never even knew about.

It turns out that baby cahows are rather like human teenagers — they want to grow up too fast. The cameras recently revealed that at just one week old, these rare seabirds were already displaying an appetite for flight.

“We noticed our chick was carrying out wing exercises and what we call push-ups which they do to help lock the wing tendons into place that they need for soaring. We had no idea — that is completely new. We had seen them doing that when they were fully mature and exercising at night just before they fly out to sea. Nobody had any idea that they were doing that at this age. They just have these tiny little stubs — like wing buds — waving around and we got some neat footage of that,” he beams.

“That already points out the value of this — it is enabling us to confirm things we just never could have before because a chick would not do that if the nest was open.”

Jeremy said he hopes to confirm further behaviours that he suspects including the nature of the semi-symbiotic relationship between skinks and cahows. He has seen skinks in the nests snuggling up to the chicks to keep warm but believes they may also perform housekeeping duties like eating up insects and waste material. He tells me he has also seen little rocks near the nests which he suspects the chicks might be sitting on as if to practise egg incubation. 

Jeremy is so excited by the new discoveries of the Cahow Cam, he tells us he wants to name the chick J-P. After an hour or so of filming we packed up the equipment and headed back to the main land. 

While the cams have answered so many questions in such a short amount of time, I can’t help but look forward to the other secrets it will reveal in the coming months and years.