David B. Wingate

Who is David B. Wingate?

Dr David Balcombe Wingate OBE, born October 11, 1935, is an ornithologist, naturalist and conservationist. He was born in Bermuda.

In 1951 he helped Robert Cushman Murphy and Louis L. Mowbray re-discover a bird species thought extinct since the 1620s, the Bermuda petrel or Cahow.

This spurred him on to study Zoology at Cornell University, returning to take on the challenge of saving the Cahow in 1958. He went on to become the Conservation Officer for the Bermuda Government Parks Department from 1966 to his retirement in 2000.

He was credited with rediscovering the Black-capped Petrel in Haiti in 1963.

His lifelong efforts to bring back the Cahow from near-extinction led him to undertake the holistic restoration of an entire barren island's pre-colonial ecology, in a project known as the Nonsuch Island 'Living museum', reintroducing several other species in the process.

He has been honoured with a number of awards. These include the Queen's Honours, the MBE and OBE; King's Honours, Ridder, Order of the Golden Ark; the United Nations' Global 500 Award and Dr.of Sci. Honoris causa, Clark University, Massachusetts. In 1991 he was awarded the Linnaean Society of New York's Eisenmann Medal. In 2007 he was nominated for the 2008 Indianapolis prize. In 2012, a biography was published about his life's work.