Hacking GoPros to help save the Atlantic’s rarest bird

The representation streams implicit YouTube successful crisp grayscale: a young cahow — known extracurricular Bermuda arsenic the Bermuda petrel — scrambles done a sandy passageway and pokes its tiny caput supra the crushed for the archetypal time. It’s a fewer months old, but it has ne'er seen daylight. Gray fluffball hatchlings walk their full lives up to this infinitesimal successful a pitch-dark burrow arsenic acold arsenic 15 feet underground. Now, successful the mediate of the night, this small vertebrate flaps and flexes its wings, perches astatine the borderline of a cliff, and launches itself into the wind. It won’t interaction down connected onshore again anytime soon: a cahow’s archetypal formation tin past 3 to 5 years. While it whitethorn remainder connected the h2o for a fewer minutes present and there, it’s astir wholly airborne, zigzagging for hundreds of thousands of miles crossed the Atlantic precocious seas, even sleeping portion successful flight. If it survives this odyssey, it volition travel close backmost present — to this small speck of an outer land — landing arsenic small arsenic a gait distant from the nest wherever it was born. 

For centuries, nary 1 knew this highly antithetic vertebrate inactive existed. The cahow, Bermuda’s nationalist bird, was assumed extinct for centuries, and adjacent aft its rediscovery successful the 1 …

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