Darroch Whitaker was a boy on Bill Montevecchi's street in the St. John's area when he first tagged along on the neighborhood's Christmas bird counts, trailing a scientist he would later study under at Memorial University and, eventually, join as a fellow researcher. Montevecchi, the seabird biologist who spent more than four decades building Memorial University of Newfoundland into one of the world's leading centers for seabird research, died on July 11, 2026. He was 80.

He was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1946, to Aldo and Lorraine Montevecchi. He earned a bachelor's degree at Northeastern University in Boston, a master's degree at Tulane University, and a doctorate at Rutgers University in Newark. In 1975 he joined Memorial University's Department of Psychology as an assistant professor, in what he later described as a move he expected to be temporary. He stayed for the rest of his career.

At Memorial, Montevecchi built a research program that bridged psychology, biology, and ocean sciences, and he eventually held the university's title of John Lewis Paton Distinguished University Professor. His research center of gravity was Funk Island, a remote colony some 40 kilometers off Newfoundland's northeast coast that Portuguese explorers named the island of birds in 1501 and where the flightless Great Auk was hunted to extinction by 1800. Montevecchi returned nearly every summer to study the Leach's storm-petrels, common murres, and northern gannets that still nest there. His work on seabird bycatch helped inform changes to fishing gear meant to keep birds out of nets, and he worked closely with fish harvesters across the province to put that research into practice, according to NTV. He was also a public voice pressing oil and gas companies and regulators on environmental monitoring near seabird colonies, according to CBC News. In 2018, with filmmaker Nigel Markham, he launched funkisland.ca, a nine-video website documenting the island's seabird research and history. For at least seven years, from 2017 into 2024, he also wrote "Birds I View," a monthly column for the Northeast Avalon Times that translated seabird science and Newfoundland wildlife for a general readership, part of Memorial's public outreach archive of his work.

In 2020, a Stanford University citation study placed him in the top one percent of the world's marine biologists and the top two percent of scientists across all fields, and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists gave him its Jamie Smith Memorial Mentoring Award, an honour whose citation noted that his mentoring reached past the university to amateur naturalists and birders who wrote him with their own questions, according to the Memorial University Gazette. In April 2021, the Pacific Seabird Group presented him its Lifetime Achievement Award for "exemplary, long-term contributions to seabird science, conservation, and education in all forms," per the Pacific Seabird Group.

The mentoring was not incidental to the science; by his colleagues' account it was central to it. Over his career, Montevecchi supervised 33 master's students and nine doctoral students, oversaw three postdoctoral fellows and 15 honours undergraduates, and coauthored nearly 400 publications from a lab that drew more than seven million dollars in research funding, according to the Gazette. Darroch Whitaker, the boy from his street, was one of them: he studied under Montevecchi at Memorial and later worked alongside him as an ecosystem scientist. Colleagues have said that virtually every seabird biologist working in Canada today can trace some part of their training back to him. In 2023, CBC Radio profiled that life's work in a documentary segment called "Lessons Learned from Seabirds: Adventures with Bill Montevecchi."

Nigel Markham, his collaborator on the Funk Island website, said of him: "You couldn't be around him and not kind of start to look at the world in the way that he looked at it," according to CBC News. Whitaker, reflecting on his former teacher, said Montevecchi "would really want to be remembered as someone who cared deeply about nature in Newfoundland [and Labrador] and who tried his best to try and save preserve nature, see conservation happen here so there will be a legacy of these beautiful natural resources into the future."

Montevecchi is survived by his wife, Janet, and their children, Nicholas, Gioia, and Marina. Visitation was held at Caul's Funeral Home in St. John's, and the family is directing memorial donations to Friends of Cape St. Mary's, a seabird ecological reserve on the Avalon Peninsula. A scholarship fund is also being established in his name.

What Montevecchi leaves in Newfoundland is not one discovery but a whole way of watching the ocean: the storm-petrel and gannet datasets other scientists continue to build on, the Funk Island website that keeps a hard-to-reach colony visible to the public, and a line of researchers, Whitaker among them, who learned from him how to read a seabird colony patiently, over decades, one summer at a time.