ST. JOHN’S — Scientists, academics, friends and family gathered on Sunday to honour the life of world-renowned seabird biologist William Montevecchi, who died earlier this year at the age of 80. Montevecchi was professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador for more than 40 years. He was ranked by Stanford University among the top two per cent of the world’s scientists in 2020. In almost every year of his career, he travelled to a remote, barren rock in the North Atlantic Ocean called Funk Island where he lived among more than a million seabirds for weeks on end. The island was home to one of the last colonies of the great auk, whose life and extinction Montevecchi studied. In 2021, he took his last voyage to the island, which is about 65 kilometres off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. His two daughters, Gioia and Marina Montevecchi, went with him. “Dad would make us walk behind him through the bird colonies, like Moses parting the sea,” Gioia Montevecchi said in an interview Monday. “He was just in awe of the world. He really paid attention to the marine environment and the impacts of climate change in the North Atlantic, using seabirds as indicators,” she added. “The more he knew, the more he was interested in learning.” Montevecchi was born in 1964, in Massachusetts. He first began studying chickens, but ultimately had an opportunity to focus on sea birds and move to Newfoundland and Labrador, where he’d have plenty of opportunity for field work, said his colleague, Pierre-Paul Bitton, an associate professor of psychology and chair of the school’s cognitive and behavioural ecology program studying animal behaviour. “He never looked back,” Bitton said in an interview. His daughter, Gioia Montevecchi, said she grew up in a house full of graduate students and oiled and injured birds her father was nursing back to health. He hitched rides on fishing boats to Funk Island, an ecological reserve atop a barren rock that is roughly 700 metres long. There is nothing to see in any direction but open water, birds and their pungent excrement, and there is still equipment in her parents’ basement that carries its distinctive smell, his daughter said. He gathered vast quantities of data about the birds and their behaviour, and he was always happy to share it, Bitton said. Montevecchi retired in 2021, but he kept working with students and leading research projects well after he finished. His daughter said she wrote a book chapter with him in the last six months of his life, and he was still working on another book when he died in July. He was dedicated to teaching the next generation of scientists, Bitton said. Colleagues often joked that half the scientists now working for Environment Canada in Newfoundland and Labrador were once Montevecchi’s students, he added. Montevecchi did countless media interviews, urging protection for wildlife and the environment as the province’s cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s and the offshore oil industry took hold. Chris O’Neill-Yates, a retired national reporter for Newfoundland and Labrador with CBC News, said Montevecchi’s passion and clarity helped residents understand the interwoven life in the ocean around them. He saw it as part of his job to inform the public and he would do interviews in the field, surrounded by shrieking birds, she said. Scientists and fish harvesters in the province often butt heads, but fishers loved Montevecchi, O’Neill-Yates said in an interview. “He knew there were people who opposed what he was saying. He was taking on some really big heavy-hitters in the work that he did,” she said. But he stuck to the facts and stayed composed, even when head-to-head with politicians on the evening news, she said. “(He) understood that people had a right to information,” O’Neill-Yates said. “He did a tremendous service to the public of Newfoundland and Labrador.” Montevecchi’s family and colleagues at Memorial University have established the Dr. William Montevecchi Memorial Scholarship to support a graduate student in the school’s cognitive and behavioural ecology program. They unveiled it to a crowd of more than 100 people gathered for Montevecchi’s memorial on Sunday, in a university building just outside St. John’s, N.L., that looks out over the ocean. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 2, 2026.
