David B. Wingate 1935 – 2026

Biography

David Balcombe Wingate was a Bermudian ornithologist, naturalist and conservationist who devoted his life to saving the Bermuda petrel, or cahow, from extinction. Born in Bermuda on October 11, 1935, he was fifteen when he helped Robert Cushman Murphy and Louis S. Mowbray rediscover the cahow in 1951, a bird thought extinct since the 1620s. He studied zoology at Cornell University, served as Conservation Officer for the Bermuda Government Parks Department from 1966 to 2000, and rediscovered breeding colonies of the black-capped petrel in Haiti in 1963. His restoration of Nonsuch Island as a “living museum” of pre-colonial Bermuda gave the cahow a home again, and his work was told in the 2012 biography Rare Birds. He was appointed OBE. He died on November 10, 2026, aged 91.