David B. Wingate

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Dr. David B. Wingate

David Balcombe Wingate

ornithologist, naturalist and conservationist. He was born in Bermuda
.

In 1951 he helped

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 discovering breeding colonies of the black-capped petrel in Haiti in 1963.[1]

His lifelong efforts to bring back the cahow from near-extinction led him to undertake 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 (UK), the MBE and

Indianapolis prize and in 2017 he was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement award from BirdsCaribbean. In 2012, a biography
was published about his life's work.

He has three daughters. His eldest daughter, Janet, has written an award-winning educational autobiography about her father's Nonsuch project, which has been adopted by the Bermuda Education Ministry as a schoolbook. More recently, Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction, a biography of Wingate and the story of his fight to save the cahows, was published in October 2012.

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