Hacking GoPros to help save the Atlantic’s rarest bird
The image streams over YouTube in crisp grayscale: a young cahow — known outside Bermuda as the Bermuda petrel — scrambles through a sandy tunnel and pokes its tiny head above the ground for the first time. It’s a few months old, but it has never seen daylight. Gray fluffball hatchlings spend their whole lives up to this moment in a pitch-dark burrow as far as 15 feet underground. Now, in the middle of the night, this little bird flaps and flexes its wings, perches at the edge of a cliff, and launches itself into the wind. It won’t touch down on land again anytime soon: a cahow’s first flight can last three to five years. While it may rest on the water for a few minutes here and there, it’s almost entirely airborne, zigzagging for hundreds of thousands of miles across the Atlantic high seas, even sleeping while in flight. If it survives this odyssey, it will come right back here — to this little speck of an outer island — landing as little as a yard away from the nest where it was born.
For centuries, no one knew this highly unusual bird still existed. The cahow, Bermuda’s national bird, was assumed extinct for centuries, and even after its rediscovery in the 1 …