Our story begins in Madeira, in1903, when a few dead birds were found and taken to Father Ernesto Schitz, a priest with a keen interest in natural history. He identified them as the Fea’s Petrel.  Thirty years later those “Fea” skins were examined by a petrel expert Gregory Matthews who realized, to his excitement, that he was looking at the remains of a completely different species, unknown to science. Since no one had seen a live bird since 1903 he naturally assumed it was, by then, extinct.

And then, in 1940, a single dead petrel was found and taken, for identification, to Alec. He immediately recognized that this bird was none other than the one wrongly identified by Father Schitz – Clearly it was not extinct after all! After this he and his son Frank, and some of their friends made repeated trips to Madeira’s high mountains where the birds were most likely to breed, listening for the calls of petrels. But they heard nothing, and saw no signs.

Then Alec had an idea – because this new species was so similar to the Fea’s petrel in appearance, perhaps its call was similar too? He had made excellent recordings of Fea’s, and these he played to shepherds in the high mountains. To the excitement of father and son, one of the shepherds recognized it at once. Frank wrote: “Lucas (the shepherd) said the calls were ‘souls of shepherds who had died in the mountains’ and that they were to be heard near Pico Cidrao, in the central massif.”

And so, in 1969, Alec, Frank and Gunther “Jerry” Maul (who had stimulated their fascination with petrels in the first place) drove to Pico Areero, high in the mountains, then climbed down to a “stone table.” Remembering that night Frank wrote: “It was bitterly cold and very dark; ideal for listening.” There they huddled, waiting.

“Suddenly,” Frank remembered, “my father nudged me and said ‘Did you hear it?’ We both listened all the more intently and heard this noise above that of the wind. ‘Yes!’ we both called in delight – waking Jerry whose snoring we had been registering!!!” The “calls” stopped!! Soon, though (with Jerry wide awake from laughing), they heard the real calls and listened, entranced to the sounds that have been described (by Malcolm Smith) as “ghostly nocturnal wailing.”