When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers
Susan Fox Rogers (ed.)
Published:
2020
Online ISBN:
9781501750939
Print ISBN:
9781501750915
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Jenn Dean
Pages
144–166
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Published:
October 2020
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Dean, Jenn, 'The Keepers of the Ghost Bird', in Susan Fox Rogers (ed.), When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers (
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Abstract
This chapter focuses on the birds in Bermuda. Prior to 1600, it is estimated that half a million pairs of devil birds bred on Bermuda, making it, in essence, a gigantic seabird colony. The cedar trees that covered Bermuda were endemic and low-growing; they tilted in high winds, uprooting and leaving small cavities beneath. The birds used their black beaks, which ended in a graceful hook, to dig twelve-foot burrows beneath the trees, and used their webbed feet to push the dirt out behind them. The sailors called it the cahow after its sound. It would be centuries before it would emerge as a species of gadfly petrel — a sleek-bodied, hollow-boned soarer with three-foot-long, paddle-shaped wings. In 1906, Dr. Louis Mowbray, who would become the first director of the Bermuda Aquarium, found a live bird in a hole on one of the Castle Harbor Islands; he classified it as a Peale's petrel from New Zealand, blown off course. A decade elapsed before an ornithologist realized that Mowbray's live bird was actually the real thing: a Bermuda petrel.
Keywords: birds, Bermuda, devil birds, seabird colony, cedar trees, cahow, gadfly petrel, Louis Mowbray, Bermuda petrel
Subject
Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
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