He is known for playing a key part in securing a nationwide ban in the United States on the use of the pesticide DDT, a decision regarded as the first important success of the emerging environmental movement.
[2] One obituary recorded: On his travels, he ate human flesh with cannibals in New Guinea, flirted with virgins in Samoa, managed a derelict coconut plantation in the Virgin islands, adopted a pet boa constrictor, tattooed his arm with sharks' teeth, searched for sunken treasure off Santo Domingo, was shipwrecked on Cape Hatteras and gave his pet cockatoo to the Emperor of Japan.
When Puleston received a handwritten letter from the Emperor thanking him for the cockatoo, his captors were so impressed that they packed him back to Europe on the Trans-Siberian railway.
He took part in amphibious operations in the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and latterly Burma, where he was badly wounded by shrapnel in a Japanese attack.
He then returned to the Pacific to organise a DUKW training school on Oahu and take part in the invasion of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
On his arrival at Long Island in 1948 he wrote "they were everywhere, repairing their huge stick nests on dead trees, utility poles and platforms erected especially for them.
High concentrations of DDT residues were found in the eggs, with scientists concluding that the pesticide must interfere with the female osprey's ability to produce normal eggshells.
The Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission regularly sprayed the Long Island countryside with DDT, and refused to accept evidence that this was having any deleterious effect on ospreys and other wildlife.
That same year, Puleston and a group of others filed a class action in the New York State Supreme Court to force the Commission to stop using DDT.
Puleston presented the court with seven watercolours that he had painted to illustrate how DDT was destroying the food chain of the local wildlife.
As Puleston and his colleagues had hoped, as the amount of DDT residues in the environment dropped, osprey numbers on Long Island began to recover.