In addition to his pioneering work on the cahow, David Wingate was proud of his work in documenting the survival of the endangered Black-capped petrel Pterodroma hasitata in Haiti.

A close relative to the cahow, a search for the supposedly extinct seabird took him across Hispaniola’s cordillera, particularly on the relatively denuded hillsides in the western third, Haiti, where it was thought to be extinct.

The invitation to help find the bird, commonly called the diablotin — or little devil — in the Caribbean came at a particularly fraught time for Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Beginning in 1961 and into the 1980s, Mr Wingate, who died on Tuesday, ventured to Haiti during the reign of its dictator, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, or “Baby Doc”.

He was once arrested in Furcy, south of Port-au-Prince, and interrogated by the dictator’s police for two days before being released.

There was also an encounter with a stuffed bird collector — who was also the madam of a popular brothel.

Along the way he met people who, upon seeing his drawing of the bird, could identify it and reported recent sightings.

Six years after returning to Bermuda to take up the cahow project, in 1963, using his years of observation in the Castle Islands, he was confident that a night-time search of the sheer cliffs of the Chaîne de la Selle mountain range just south of Port-au-Prince, would be fruitful.

The Saddle Mountain Range tops out at Pic la Sell (“La Selle peak” in English), which rises to 8,700 feet.

The epic first expedition was complete with porters who quit mid-climb, an intrepid taxi driver who proved indispensable, bouts of elevation sickness, a language barrier and the assistance of locals who were often shocked to see a White man.

“Given the similarity of the two species, I now knew how to go about it. I knew what season to look for it, the most likely places for it to nest, and what to listen for at night, because looking for burrows during the daytime was out of the question,” he wrote in his unpublished autobiography, Saving a Species: a Lifetime of Adventure with the Bermuda Petrel.

He also scaled Trois Pitons and the Morne Diablotin hills in Dominica to find the petrel.

Mr Wingate’s work in finding nesting pairs of the Black-capped petrel was vital to its survival.

The work remains to find the diablotin in other Caribbean islands and to protect known populations.

Mr Wingate wrote: “My Haitian expeditions remain with me as one of the greatest achievements of my life!”

The breeding sites in the Dominican Republic are the only ones that are constantly under surveillance and some degree of protection.

Just as with the cahow, mammals — rats, mongoose and feral dogs, and of course, humans — represent a problem as well as occasional forest fires.

A communication antennae is also a threat near one of the sites in Sierra de Bahoruco mountain range, not far from the Chaîne de la Selle.