David B. Wingate

David Balcombe Wingate OBE, born October 11, 1935, is an ornithologist, naturalist and conservationist.

In 1951 he helped Robert Cushman Murphy and Louis S. 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.

[1] 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.

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.