David Wingate

David Balcombe Wingate was born in Bermuda on 11 October 1935, the third of four children of George Wingate, an accountant from Scotland, and Aileen Pattisson, who was born in Ireland and worked as a legal secretary. His parents had come to Bermuda in the 1920s, where each already had a sibling living.

His parents encouraged his fascination with nature, and he would roam almost anywhere on the island, including the dense woodland of Walsingham Park. As a boy he found fresh bones in a cave there and wondered whether they belonged to the lost cahow. At Saltus Grammar School his classmates called him "Bird". When Robert Cushman Murphy met him in 1951, he described the schoolboy to The Royal Gazette as "an excellent and agile naturalist".

On the weekend of 27 and 28 January 1951, Louis S. Mowbray of the Bermuda Aquarium and Robert Cushman Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History took the 15-year-old Wingate with them to the Castle Roads islets in Castle Harbour. On Inner Pear islet, a barren rock of little more than half an acre, they pulled a live Bermuda petrel from a deep crevice. The species had been believed extinct since the 1620s, eaten out by the first settlers and their pigs and rats.

Wingate later remembered Murphy holding up the bird and Mowbray exclaiming "By Gad the cahow!". That night he wrote in his diary: "I could think of nothing better than to hear the song and watch the courtship and actions of this almost unknown bird." He told The Wall Street Journal in 2000 that he had decided then and there to be the one who brought the cahow back from extinction.

Wingate attended Saltus Grammar School in Bermuda and went on to study zoology at Cornell University in New York state, graduating in 1957. Cornell's programme regularly sent students on birding expeditions to Mexico and the Great Plains. He chose not to pursue postgraduate degrees because, as he put it, bringing back the cahow was what he was meant to do. Although he was often called "Dr Wingate", he did not hold a PhD; he did receive an honorary Doctor of Science from Clark University in Massachusetts.

Wingate returned to Bermuda in 1958 to take on the cahow recovery. In the early years he lived on grants arranged through Louis Mowbray from the paleontologist Childs Frick, with further support from the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History and the Bermuda Government. In 1961 the Governor formalised his position, and in 1966 he became Bermuda's first Conservation Officer, a role he held until he retired at 65 in 2000.

He spent countless winter nights on the Castle Islands studying the nocturnal birds, sometimes taking a day to row between islets. He worked out that the birds needed safe, dark burrows and created artificial ones by digging tunnels and nesting chambers and capping them with concrete domes that had an observation hole. He also fitted baffles at burrow entrances that kept out larger competing birds. In 1963 he documented breeding colonies of the endangered black-capped petrel in Haiti, a close relative of the cahow.

The recovery programme he founded continues under his successor, Jeremy Madeiros. The population grew from 18 nesting pairs in 1951 to 172 breeding pairs in 2024.

In 1961 Wingate and Louis Mowbray Jr lobbied the government to declare the 15-acre Nonsuch Island a nature reserve. Some thought the idea was crazy. Wingate, newly married, took the job of caretaker and moved there with his wife, turning an old quarantine station into a home. "To me it was paradise," he later said.

Nonsuch had lost its cedars to blight and its other vegetation to goats. Recognising that it was isolated enough to keep out many introduced predators and plants, he began restoring it, plant by plant, to the ecology of pre-colonial Bermuda, culling invasive species, replanting native and endemic plants and recreating a natural pond. The result became known as the Nonsuch "living museum", an open-air laboratory and classroom. Cahows were later translocated to the island and now breed there. Wingate said: "I am also proud of the successful restoration of Nonsuch with native flora, which was what most people said would never be possible."

In 1959 Wingate married Monica Ann "Anita" Morrison, an Englishwoman, and they raised their daughters Janet and Karen on Nonsuch Island. In 1973 Anita was badly burned while tending a barrel used as an incinerator, after accidentally adding methylated spirits to smouldering ashes. She died in hospital five days later. A court later found the hospital negligent. Her death affected him deeply, as Elizabeth Gehrman's biography describes.

He later married Elizabeth (nee Roche), with whom he had a daughter, Rosalind; they divorced in 1995. His third wife, Helge (nee Trapnell), was with him from 1996 until her death in 2024. He was survived by three daughters, nine grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. His eldest daughter, Janet, wrote the book Nonsuch Summer about her father's work, which has been used in Bermuda schools.

Wingate believed that conservation meant restoring whole ecosystems, not just protecting single species. He was a fearless public voice and often took unpopular positions. In 1996 he called the protection of the Castle Islands "critical" to Bermuda. After his retirement he challenged a special development order for Tucker's Point, writing that the caves under Paynter's Hill and Quarry Hill held more than 60 species of native and endemic marine invertebrates and fossils of Bermuda's pre-colonial birds and land snails. He also warned early about plastic pollution, telling The Royal Gazette in 1993 that the litter on Nonsuch's south beach had risen sharply since the 1960s. He preferred to pronounce the bird's name "cay-how".

Wingate is credited with saving one of the world's rarest seabirds and with pioneering restoration ecology in Bermuda. He co-founded the Bermuda Audubon Society as a teenager, helped rehabilitate Paget Marsh with Dennis Sherwin, contributed to the restoration vision for Trunk Island as the Bermuda Zoological Society's Living Classroom, and was a founding member of the Nonsuch Natural History Course. He taught generations of conservation officers, students and volunteers, made countless school visits and lectured at the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum and Zoo. The Royal Gazette named him one of 100 Bermudians on its Millennium List.

Member of the Order of the British Empire (1975). Officer of the Order of the British Empire (2000). Queen's Medal of Honour. Knight (Ridder) of the Order of the Golden Ark, conferred by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (1981). Honorary Doctor of Science, Clark University (1981). Eisenmann Medal, Linnaean Society of New York (1991). Kai Curry-Lindahl Award, Colonial Waterbird Society (1993). United Nations Environment Programme Global 500 Roll of Honour. Nominee for the 2008 Indianapolis Prize (2007). Lifetime Achievement Award, BirdsCaribbean (2017).

Wingate published The Checklist and Guide to the Birds, Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians of Bermuda in 1959, at the age of 24. He wrote on the 19th-century naturalist John Tavenier Bartram (1964), on helping Bermuda's bluebird (1970), the essay Heritage Under Siege (1984) and a guide to artificial nesting sites for longtails (1988), and privately published an autobiography, Saving a Species: a Lifetime of Adventure with the Bermuda Petrel.

He was the subject of Lucinda Spurling's documentary Rare Bird (2005), of Deirdre Brennan's film Bermuda's Treasure Island for Green Planet Films, of an episode of the Treasures television series, and of Elizabeth Gehrman's biography Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction (Beacon Press, 2012). He appeared on To Tell The Truth in its 1974 to 1975 season and on a 1999 Nightline special.

David Wingate died on 10 November 2026, aged 91. The Royal Gazette published its obituary on 12 November 2026, and the Government of Bermuda issued a statement from the Minister of Public Works and Environment, Jaché Adams, the same day. The cause and place of death have not been made public. The seabird guide Bob Flood of Scilly Pelagics, visiting Nonsuch Island on the day he died, wrote that his "spirit was in every Cahow we handled". Funeral arrangements have not been made public.