A DIYer showed just how much you can learn about nature's mysteries if you're willing to get creative. In this case, the enigma was Bermuda's nocturnal national bird, the cahow.
The Verge reported on Jean-Pierre Rouja and his enterprising efforts to discover more about the cahow. The bird was believed to be extinct for hundreds of years until it was spotted in the 1950s.
A young cahow spends months underground before emerging for a nearly uninterrupted flight of up to five years. Twenty years ago, Rouja pursued a short film about the cahow's return to Bermuda's Nonsuch island. The logistics immediately proved daunting.
"They're in dark, man-made burrows," he told The Verge. "You can access them, but then you're ripping the roof off their house, and you're not witnessing any natural behavior."
Adding to the challenge were the limitations of tech in 2005, including the prohibitive cost of underground cameras.
"It just technically wasn't possible at the time," Rouja said. Fortunately, the "frustrated electrical engineer" was the perfect guy to experiment and rig the tech accordingly, as The Verge detailed.
In 2010, Rouja joined an internet subculture that was hacking GoPro Hero cameras at the time. He took steps like removing the cameras' IR filters, and installing LED bulbs that could operate in the wild. Long story short, by 2011, Rouja created his own live-streaming wildlife camera that could observe the cahows from above without disturbing them.
The camera produces high-quality black-and-white images of the cahow and has allowed for new discoveries. That includes the fact that the Bermuda skink, a very rare lizard, has a mutually beneficial relationship with the cahow.
Best of all, Rouja believes his improvised setup can be a model for more affordable conservation tech elsewhere when trail cameras aren't up to the task. Conventional tech like thermal cameras, satellite trackers, and deep-sea sensors uncover remarkable footage, but they can be extremely pricey.
Rouja is targeting Hawaiʻi for more nest cams and is looking to deploy cameras and AI to help protect the cahow against threats like invasive rats. This inventive use of tech can help ensure rare species survive and preserve valuable members of the ecosystem.
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Lower energy bills 💸 "The cahow project was my gateway into conservation tech," Rouja concluded. "We're using Bermuda as a proof of concept to make sure these technologies work, with the goal of then being able to roll this all out at scale."
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