Rare Birds (eBook)

David Wingate wants to see his birds. 'This is cahow weather,' he says, peering through the rain-splashed windshield of his white Suzuki Alto at treetops dancing violently in the wind. 'We may be miserable, but the cahows are just yippee-happy right now. If we could go out to Nonsuch tonight, they'd be celebrating.'

Just a handful of people have seen cahows in flight, and even fewer have witnessed the staggeringly graceful, scramjet-fast aerial court- ship they perform on only the darkest fall and winter nights. Wingate, though, has spent enough time with the birds that he has felt their wings brush the top of his head as they darted past him in the black- ened sky, gliding ever slower through the air before dropping to land like a cartoon anvil. But in the past few years things have changed, and troubles from bad knees to bad blood have conspired to keep him from the birds he calls his first love.

This week he's supposed to make his first trip to Nonsuch at night in two years. He'd been trying to get out there--or at least into the harbor in his boat--for a night watch once or twice every November since he moved off the island in 2003, but last year he didn't go because of the knee-replacement surgery that laid him up for six months and left six-inch vertical scars in the dead center of both his legs. Before that--well, it's a long story.

Mid-November is when the birds are most active, from a human perspective. It's when the returning fledglings arrive at Castle Harbour after as much as four years spent flying virtually nonstop, drinking seawater and sleeping on the wing. During that time a young cahow might travel thousands of miles a week, weaving in and out among the rolling waves and heaving swells of the open ocean, alone feathered missile gliding and banking along the westerlies as it roams over millions of square miles of the Atlantic. Then, one day, a day like every other in the bird's life so far, some unknowable instinct kicks in, some primal urge tells it to head back to Bermuda to find a mate. And, like a high school senior hustling to Cancun for spring break, it does. And when it arrives, it lands within three yards of the tree or rock or sheer cliff wall from which it fledged. When it takes off again to get to the business at hand, it rises and dips through the night sky and calls to its new friends in low, spectral moans until that special someone answers and the sexual chemistry becomes so achingly clear that the other birds must roll their eyes and tell the pair to get a burrow.

Seeing that, to Wingate, is heaven, an adrenaline high like no other. But this week, as in Novembers recently past, the Fates are refusing to allow him his greatest thrill.
First, there's the weather, which is often unsettled in Bermuda this time of year. What the weather service describes as a 'solid cloud deck' is hovering over the country, tomorrow it will combine with a low- pressure system from the south and the next day with the nor'easter created by what's left of Hurricane Ida as it charges up the coast of the United States, generating a mini perfect storm that will result in near-constant rain, winds gusting to 33 miles an hour, and a total of just a few hours of sunshine over the next three days. The small-craft warning that will be issued for each of those days would most certainly apply to Wingate's battered 17-foot Boston Whaler--not that that sort of thing usually keeps him out of the water.

Far worse than the weather, for Wingate, is that he threw his back out yesterday after having to bail his boat with a hand pump because the electrical system's on the fritz...