This story of the Gould’s petrel begins in the 1980s, when the outlook for the remaining population was grim. They were breeding on the seventy-four-acre Cabbage Tree Island off the east coast of New South Wales, Australia—and apart from a couple of pairs found nesting on nearby Boondelbah Island, they were breeding nowhere else. Their habitat on Cabbage Tree Island had deteriorated so badly that the petrels’ continued survival hung in the balance.

Originally, they nested in cavities among the rocks on slopes in the subtropical rain forests. But their breeding grounds were degraded by introduced rabbits, creating a more open understory that enabled the native pied currawongs (Strepera graculina), a kind of crow, to get at the incubating petrels and their young. The new rabbit-altered landscape also permitted proliferation of the native bird lime tree (Pisonia umbellifera). The petrels became entangled in their very sticky fruits—which, unfortunately, ripen and drop during the breeding season.

In 1989, a system of monitoring during the breeding season was introduced, and it was found that more adults died than chicks were fledged. By 1992, there were fewer than 250 breeding pairs, and less than 20 percent of these fledged their young. Add to this the fact that so many young birds die at sea before ever coming back to land—out of a hundred fledged, perhaps only fifteen may come back. It was clear that measures had to be taken to prevent an irreversible decline. This was when Nicholas Carlile and David Priddel stepped in.

I first “met” Nicholas on the phone, when I called him out of the blue to talk about his rediscovery of the Lord Howe’s Island phasmid (an amazing story in itself that is featured in the “Lazarus” chapter in our book, where we discuss species that were re-discover after being presumed extinct), and I was instantly attracted by his passion and eloquence. He told me that he was once a professional actor, has his own radio show, and enjoys communicating with people. In other words, he is a great spokesman for conservation. And when I met him in Australia a couple of years later, my first impression of a warm and dedicated person—and a fun one—was substantiated.

Nicholas and David (whom I have not yet met) have been involved in countless projects to save endangered island birds and restore the islands themselves, and it was hard to know which I should choose to describe. But Nicholas told me that his work with the Gould’s petrel and the restoration of its habitat on Cabbage Tree Island were, in his opinion, his most important contributions to date.

Pioneering Work to Start a New Colony
When he and David planned their strategy, the obvious first steps were to remove bird lime trees from the only two gullies where the Gould’s petrels nested on the island (accomplished during 1993), eradicate the rabbits (the last one was gone by the end of 1997), and control the currawongs (well under way by 1998). Although these efforts were helping the Gould’s petrel on Cabbage Tree Island, Nicholas and Dave realized that it was important to try to start a second colony to serve as insurance in case some disaster, such as fire or disease, struck the Cabbage Tree colony. Before designing their own program, they first visited similar projects in New Zealand—where the chicks had suffered between 40 and 60 percent mortality. They came to the conclusion that the chicks in those programs had been moved when they were too young, which meant that biologists had to care for them for long periods, and that “their diet had been way too complicated—involving analyzing stomach contents, sterilizing, and mixing in vitamins.”

And so, in 1995, they began their own trial program that would, they hoped, enable them to solve some of the problems that had plagued the New Zealand projects. “We used the KISS principle,” Nicholas told me: “Keep it simple, stupid!”

Although their ultimate goal was to start a second colony on another island, for the first four years they worked on Cabbage Tree Island itself. In March 1995, about three weeks before they were due to fledge, thirty petrel chicks were moved from one of the two breeding areas on Cabbage Tree Island to the other. This meant they were moved from one steep-sided gulley to another, just 250 yards away. They transferred the chicks “only days before they were going to leave their burrows for the first time anyway.” It was very important not to move them too late—for it is when they leave their nests to look around (about eleven days prior to fledging) that the location of the nest is imprinted in the brain. This is the place to which they will subsequently return, three to five years later, to nest themselves.

Once taken from their nests, the chicks were placed in specially molded plastic nest boxes designed by Nicholas and his team. Here the petrels were cared for by the biologists, fed every second day, weighed, and measured. They grew at the same rate as the chicks being raised by their parents, and they all fledged successfully. Which meant, of course, that they took off in the darkness of night and flew out to spend the next three or four years at sea, never touching dry land, foraging at least as far as Tasmania.

Three years after the first chicks left, some of them returned to Cabbage Tree Island for the breeding season—and they, like the others who fledged in the following years, were mostly faithful to the place where they’d first emerged as chicks, not to the place where they’d hatched. In 1999, four years after the first translocations on Cabbage Tree, Nicholas and Dave were ready to begin establishing a breeding colony on another island. The trials had been successful; good data had been collected. All was set for the next exciting phase in the restoration of the Gould’s petrel.

The Move to Boondelbah Island
In Australia, a species cannot be moved to an area where it was never present, so it was fortunate that one or two pairs of Gould’s petrels had been recorded nesting naturally on Boondelbah, the tiny island selected for the new colony. It is more or less intact, with just a few non-endemic plants that aren’t harmful to the petrels.

This project was not for the fainthearted. Researchers set off in March with one hundred three-week-old chicks. The seas were rough. They had to steer the Zodiac into the mouth of a ravine, ride in on a wave, leap off with the chicks, and hurry them up off the beach to their waiting nest boxes set into the ground on a thirty-degree slope. The ravine itself has a seventy-degree slope, and they had to use a caving ladder to reach their camp at the top. Their work with the chicks, feeding and weighing and so on, took place at the bottom of the ravine. Conditions were challenging, and the crew had to be tough.

I listened to Nicholas talking about it on one of his radio programs. “It was exhilarating, seat-of-the-pants work,” he said. “It was a fifty-meter climb for a cup of tea!” It was especially exciting because “no one had tried this in Australia before.”

And it was very successful. They lost five chicks the first year, but solved the problem and had 100 percent success in 2000. In other words, 195 out of 200 chicks fledged in two years. And after four years, forty Gould’s petrels had arrived to breed on Boondelbah Island, and thirty-five of their chicks fledged. The birds returning to their translocation site to breed had attracted others, and the colony was growing. The plastic nest boxes provide a stable artificial habitat, since each one can last thirty years or so, and are constructed so that only the little petrels can get in. Every year the biologists go and check the situation.

“This colony has now grown to almost thirty breeding pairs,” Nicholas told me, “and the first chicks to be produced in the Boondelbah colony have now begun returning to breed themselves—our third generation!” By 2003, there were 911 pairs of Gould’s petrels nesting on Cabbage Tree Island. It was decided that the management plan was a success and that no further action was necessary to safeguard this breeding colony. When I spoke to Nicholas in the beginning of 2008, he told me that the total population now numbers more than a thousand individuals, with over four hundred chicks produced each year. “The island is now so populated with petrels that over six hundred nest markers were removed in recent years as there were too many pairs to monitor,” he told me.

During their work with Gould’s petrels, Nicholas and Dave pioneered the modern technique of petrel translocation now used in other countries for seabird restorations. “Our success with Gould’s was such that it has been the first seabird internationally to be recommended for downlisting due entirely to sound conservation management. Not a bad result,” Nicholas said to me. “The over five hundred nights spent on the island between 1992 and 2001 were worth it!”

A Defining Moment
I suspect that it was not just official acknowledgment of the success of the program that made all those nights worthwhile for Nicholas, but also some of the heartwarming experiences with the birds themselves. Indeed, he told me that during one of those nights, something happened that was “the defining moment” of his work with Gould’s petrels.

In 1992–1993, he spent three days every week on Cabbage Tree Island for the seven months of the breeding season (October to April). One night in late March he was sitting in camp, at about midnight, after an evening spent walking through the colony looking for new nests and banding those birds who were outside their nests. He heard a crashing in the vegetation and knew it marked the unsuccessful fledging attempt of a young petrel he had seen outside the nest earlier that evening.

“The bird was quite calm,” he said, “so I picked it up and walked to a break in the vegetation overlooking a stretch of open ocean. I held it in my cupped hands, studying it by starlight, my heart beating a little faster in expectation of what I was about to witness. It turned to face the sea and sat quite content but alert. Every now and then a flurry of breeze would pass and the bird would shift its weight as if testing the wind. After some time and without preamble it launched itself when a breeze hit us and sailed out into the night.”

As the petrel disappeared, Nicholas said he “noticed a satellite tracking across the heavens on its relentless passage around the earth. I could not help reflecting that we humans have the skill and technology to launch those complex machines into space but are totally baffled as to where these enigmatic little petrels spend most of their lives and how the hell they know where to come back to, to breed and continue the survival of their species. Humbling, really.”

It is moments like this that make it all worthwhile.