It was mid-September 2003, and Bermuda had just endured the tremendous onslaught of Hurricane Fabian. After churning the seas around this Island for a day and a night, its massively destructive forces swirled on and into the northern Atlantic.

As the enormous scale of the erosional damage to Bermuda's southern shoreline became evident, Conservation Officer Jeremy Madeiros realised the restoration programme for Bermuda's endangered cahow, ongoing by then for more than 40 years, had reached a watershed.

"We knew we needed to establish a nesting colony on a larger island," Mr. Madeiros said, recounting the moment to a Bermuda Audubon Society audience of enthusiastic birders.

The cahows' tiny nesting islands in Castle Harbour, damaged catastrophically by Fabian's ferocious 35-foot seas, had been compromised to the point where the next hurricane will almost certainly lead to mass erosion and perhaps the destruction of these important and final breeding outposts.

Encouraging a species of bird to expand its nesting habitat into another area involves a process called translocation, and Mr. Madeiros realised he had to start as quickly as possible.

The story of the translocation project was the main topic of a lecture given by the Government Conservation Officer at the Bermuda Audubon Society's annual general meeting at the beginning of June. His talk was illustrated with photography, much of which has never been seen publicly until that evening, by The Royal Gazette's Chris Burville, who has documented the entire 2007 through 2008 cahow nesting season, as well as Mr. Madeiros's own photographs and those of Audubon Society stalwart Andrew Dobson and British birder and photographer Ian Fisher.

This year is the final year of that translocation programme, jump-started in the aftermath of the fury of Hurricane Fabian. Since 2004, a total of 104 chicks have now been moved to Nonsuch Island, of which 101 successfully fledged out to sea. And fittingly, this year saw the first of those birds — sometimes called the ghost bird — return to Nonsuch, and in some cases to the very burrows from which they had fledged.

Mr. Madeiros told the capacity audience: "It was absolutely necessary to jump-start the programme, because of the hurricanes coupled with the rise in sea level."

He said scientific predictions foresee that the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free during the summer months by about 2012 to 2015. He described this frozen ocean as Greenland's 'refrigerator' and explained that without it, the resultant melting ice on that land mass could lead to sea level rise in the region of 23 feet in the coming decades.

Another reason for the move to Nonsuch was that the process of building concrete burrows, in which the birds nest, on these small, craggy and inaccessible islands is extremely labour intensive and dangerous.

As well, the four tiny, barren islands that are home to those nests total just two acres, while Nonsuch is 16 acres with soil and trees. The return of the cahows to Nonsuch allows the birds to revert to their natural behaviour of digging their burrows in wooded areas. "The original settlers described the cahows as "nesting in burrows in the ground like rabbits in a warren", he said. They now also can climb trees from which to launch themselves into flight.

"Nonsuch can support 3,000 to 5,000 pairs of birds," Mr. Madeiros informed his audience. "And Southampton Island in Castle Harbour has the potential to become a new nesting colony as well."

He explained the translocation process was developed to move puffins in Maine, and is also used in Australia to aid their petrel population. Mr. Madeiros went to Australia in 2001 where he learned how the process works. And Australian Nick Carlile of the New South Wales Parks and Wildlife Service came to Bermuda to help during the inaugural season.

"We translocated 14 that first year, and they all successfully fledged out to sea," he said.

The process begins when a cahow pair produces their single egg. Mr. Madeiros closely monitors its development from the time the egg is laid, and once the chick has hatched, measures and weighs it about twice a week. As this process continues, he identifies birds that he believes will make good candidates for the translocation programme. There is a short window of opportunity to move the fledglings: after they have reached an established size, they must be translocated within a matter of days to the new nesting site.

"We use waxed cardboard tomato boxes to move the birds," the conservation officer said, explaining they are splash proof and offer protection to the cahows as they are moved by boat from their nesting island to Nonsuch. "We move their nest material too. They have a very distinctive musky smell. Petrels have a very, very strong sense of smell — they can smell a school of fish under the surface! So, going into a new nest, it will smell the same as the nest they have left and that will help them to accept it."

The journey from the nesting islets to Nonsuch is a short one, and can be accomplished in less than an hour. In places like New Zealand translocations will sometimes take the birds more than 150 kilometres from their original nesting sites.

While they're at Nonsuch, the Conservation Officer takes on the role of the parent bird, feeding the chicks every couple of days. "The squid in Bermuda is a bit of problem," he said. "It's not suitable for the chicks. So we get sushi quality squid from Miles supermarket at $18 a pound. It doesn't smell fishy at all!"

Stuffed with locally caught anchovies provided by Chris Flook from the Bermuda Aquarium, the cahow chick's meal is ready to go.

"We wrap them in a tea towel, and gently immobilise the bird. We raise their upper bill with one hand, and... they eat better than I do! And they can eat amazingly large things — they slurp it right down."

The cahow chicks are also given vitamins to ensure that they leave Nonsuch in the best possible health.

"Once you've fed them, they will often do their favourite thing — climb." Mr. Madeiros showed slides illustrating how these young birds make their way up the arm of the Conservation Officer and may find their way onto his head. "They use their beak and sharp claws on their webbed feet to pull themselves up. In Australia, we've seen petrels climb 90 feet up trees. They are very agile, unlike the longtail, which is helpless on land."

He said: "After they're weighed, measured and fed, we put them back in their burrows."

In preparation for fledging, after a few days in their new burrows the young birds will begin to emerge at night. They wait until it is pitch black, at least to a human's eye, and then spend hours looking at the terrain around them. It is believed that they are imprinting on landmarks so when they mature to the point that they are ready to breed themselves, they will return to this same nesting place.

The chicks also start a process called exercising, where they repeatedly flap their wings violently for several seconds to build up their flight muscles in preparation for fledging. This is important — once they leave dry land, they will spend several years on and over the ocean before they return again.

"After a night of exercising, they go back inside their burrow for the day," Mr. Madeiros said.

After a few days of this behaviour, the young cahow will make the decision to launch himself into the air, and thus begins a three to five year journey — if they survive their first weeks at sea. It will take them to the western edges of the Gulf Stream where they will live until it is time for them to come back to Bermuda and the islets of their birth.

As well as translocating the chicks, the Conservation Officer said they are using a programme called sound attraction to lure the birds to Nonsuch when they do return to these waters. A DVD of cahow courtship calls was recorded, and using a solar powered, timed player, during the breeding season it switches on at dusk. He explained that cahows look for cahow-related activity when they return to Bermuda to nest. "We wanted them to think that Nonsuch was the hottest cahow nightclub!"

Although the courtship calls were being played from the banks of Nonsuch Island, the first cahows were not expected to return until 2010. But in a year that has seen 40 chicks reach fledgling status — a record number — the birding enthusiasts who filled the BUEI's auditorium heard Mr. Madeiros explain that on the night of February 10 this year, "the next thing I knew cahows were flying over Nonsuch. For an hour and a half, six to eight birds were flying around, calling to each other. For the first time in 400 years!"

"We have started to see the birds land. Then, we've seen soil dug out of the artificial nest burrows built for the translocation project, so the birds were landing and investigating burrows."

Typically it is the young male cahows who return to their nesting island first, a year before the females come back to land. The male establishes a burrow, and the following year will woo a mate to nest with them in that burrow.

"We did recapture a few birds in burrows. I was able to confirm from their identification bands that they're all translocated birds — and two or three came back to exactly the same burrow from which they had departed.

"They've come in a year to two years ahead of schedule. I could not have been more overjoyed."

As the Conservation Officer put up the final photograph of the evening — a shot of a cahow flying over Nonsuch Island, already published in The Royal Gazette and rg magazine — the audience broke into a collective gasp of recognition and delight.

He described that photograph of the silvery bird shearing over the Nonsuch foreshore as 'iconic' and said: "They have now come back. The return of the ghost bird to Nonsuch!"