David Wingate was Bermuda’s first Conservation Officer and dedicated his life’s work to the survival of the Bermuda Petrel and the creation of a “living museum” of the island’s prehistoric conditions.

The breadth and depth of Mr Wingate’s knowledge of Bermuda’s flora and fauna was unparalleled; for more than 70 years he was the island’s go-to conservationist and environmentalist.

But his rescue of the Bermuda Petrel, commonly known as the cahow, from near extinction cemented his legacy as one of the world’s leading environmentalists.

Where once they may have numbered in the millions, that the cahow appeared to have survived more than 350 years without being seen, made for a seemingly impossible tale.

The weekend of January 27 and 28, 1951, was eventful in Bermuda: strong, near-gale-force winds had whipped up a fire at the Webb Upholstery workshop on East Broadway, Pembroke, with The Royal Gazette reporting in its Sunday edition that hundreds turned out to watch firefighters at work.

Other stories in the newspaper detailed how “The Reds” in Korea were building a new defensive line as United Nations troops advanced up the peninsula.

Closer to home, organisers planned for at least 100 floats for the renamed Easter Parade, the Pageant of the Easter Lilly.

But that Sunday morning, E Louis Mowbray Sr, the director of the Aquarium Museum and Zoo, and the US seabird expert, Robert Cushman Murphy of the American Museum, ventured to Castle Roads, a string of small islands and islets on the southern side of Castle Harbour.

The islands stretch from the promontory of Tucker’s Town in the west to the southern tip of St David’s Island — still called Cooper’s Island, although that island was flattened and absorbed into St David’s to create the US Army Air Corp’s Fort Bell, now the LF Wade International Airport.

Mr Mowbray and Dr Murphy were there to find the cryptic cahow.

With them was a precocious Saltus Grammar School student, David Wingate, a keen young polymath of Bermuda’s natural life at only age 15.

Dr Murphy described the boy, nicknamed by his classmates “Bird”, to the Gazette as “an excellent and agile naturalist”.

The boy’s obsession had been nurtured by his parents, George, an accountant from Scotland, and Aileen Pattisson, who was born in Ireland. Mrs Wingate was a legal secretary.

He could and would roam just about anywhere — even into the dense “jungle” of Walsingham Park at the eastern end of Bermuda’s main island.

He would record in his notebook that he found there what were relatively fresh bones in a cave, and emerged into the sunlight, overlooking the Castle islands, imagining the bones were of a cahow.

That boy got to witness the mystery being solved and became the man who saved the species.

The expedition had focused on Inner Pear islet, near the southern, ocean-side end of Long Bay at the tip of St David’s Island.

Not much more than half an acre in size, the mostly barren Inner Pear was riddled with holes and small scatterings of sand. Soon, it was Mr Mowbray who shouted “Discovery!”, holding up a live cahow, the Gazette reported at the time.

When asked by an ornithologist about two decades ago, Mr Wingate said: “I remember him [Murphy] holding the specimen up, and Mowbray exclaimed ‘By Gad the cahow!’.

“You know the typical New England expression. I remember thinking ‘by Gad, I’ve got myself a career’.”

That night, the boy 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.”

The expedition returned over the next few nights and witnessed the nocturnal bird’s comings and goings and scurrying to their burrows.

Of course, rediscovery only brought a new conundrum — what to do with the 18 surviving pairs.

In 2000, Mr Wingate recalled that moment for the The Wall Street Journal: “I determined right then and there that I was going to be the guy who brought the cahow back from extinction.”

Indeed, he went on to dedicate his life to the survival of the species — arguing, cajoling, and charming a bureaucracy far too busy creating the modern Bermuda than to have concern for a bird only a handful of people had seen.

He did not go on to pursue postgraduate degrees — the survival of the species became his priority.

He earned a zoology degree from Cornell University in upstate New York, an Ivy league school.

Its zoology programme — innovative for its time — often sent students on school-sponsored birding expeditions to Mexico and the Great Plains of North America.

The conservationist graduated in 1957.

One misconception about him is that he held a Doctor of Philosophy degree, with even the Gazette occasionally referencing him as “Dr Wingate” over the decades.

The birds have thrived under his stewardship and, after 2000 when he was forced to retire at age 65, that of his successor Jeremy Madeiros.

Mr Wingate preferred to call the bird “cay-how” as opposed to the more common “ca-how”.

His stature as an environmentalist was unchallenged, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Bermuda’s flora and fauna. He was a fearless crusader for a better Bermuda.

The cahow’s behaviour had to be recorded, studied and recommendations made.

In the early years, he survived on grants obtained for him by Mr Mowbray from Clay Frick, a paleontologist at the New York Zoological Society, who owned a home in Tucker’s Town.

Additional funds came from the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History and the Bermuda Government.

In May 1961, with Bermuda’s modern written constitution still seven years away, the Governor, Major General Sir Julian Gascoigne, using the 17th-century prerogative of control, began to formalise Mr Wingate’s relationship to the Government, protecting him from the vagaries of funding and arbitrary employment.

Mr Wingate explained: “I first got to know Nonsuch Island and the cahows in 1951 and never dreamt that I might someday be living there but I had always been fascinated by it and how nice it would be to live there.

“By 1961, the work with the cahow progressed to the point that we realised it was going to need a larger island to secure the population in the future.

“Louis [Mowbray Jr] curator of the aquarium at that time, lobbied the government to get Nonsuch added to the list of nature reserves for the cahows.”

Mr Wingate later told the Gazette: “We lobbied the government to declare the 15-acre Nonsuch Island a nature reserve in 1961. Certain people thought it was a crazy idea.

“To me it was paradise,” said Mr Wingate. “I was newly married and looking for a home. I was given the opportunity to live on the island as caretaker for the public works department.

“I was employed on a grant to study the cahows. There was a parks department but no national parks legislation until 1986.

“There was no conservation division of parks until 1966, when I was finally employed by the government as conservation officer.”

He added: “I realised it would take decades and decades for that to happen.”

The isolation and topographical diversity of Nonsuch made it perfect for such a plan.

At that time, restoration ecology, known as “the art of the possible” was still a new field, and Mr Wingate learnt through trial and error.

“There were a lot of things I could have done better, but probably not without going through the same mistakes,” he noted.

“The cahow project has been an extraordinary success.

“I am also proud of the successful restoration of Nonsuch with native flora, which was what most people said would never be possible.”

In 2010, Mr Wingate told the Gazette that he thought it would probably be another 50 years before cedars became dominant on Nonsuch again.

The naturalist wrote extensively about the cahow and other plants and wildlife.

His autobiography, Saving a Species: a Lifetime of Adventure with the Bermuda Petrel, was privately published.

Walwyn Hughes, a former independent senator and director of agriculture and fisheries, and a friend of Mr Wingate’s, said of him: “When faced with challenges in the field of conservation, David Wingate has had the rare ability to visualise big-picture solutions.”

Dr Hughes, an entomologist and plant pathologist, added: “He has been prepared to commit the effort, energy and time necessary to implement these solutions, as evidenced by the hugely successful cahow recovery and Nonsuch Island projects.”

David Balcombe Wingate, saviour of the cahow, was born on October 11, 1935. He died on November 10, 2026, aged 91