Subsequent sightings of the cahow were believed to be confusion with the similar Audubon's Shearwater. In 1935, William Beebe of the New York Zoological Society had hopes of rediscovering the bird. By June he was presented with an unidentified seabird that had struck the St. Davids Light house in Bermuda. The bird was then sent to American ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy of The American Museum of Natural history in New York. He identified the bird as a Bermuda petrel. Six years later, Bermudian naturalist Louis L. Mowbray received a live Bermuda petrel that had collided with a radio antenna tower. The bird was released after rehabilitation two days later.