The British Ornithologists' Union (BOU) aims to encourage the study of birds (ornithology) around the world in order to understand their biology and aid their conservation. The BOU was founded in 1858 by Professor Alfred Newton, Henry Baker Tristram and other scientists. Its quarterly journal, Ibis, has been published continuously since 1859.
Alfred Newton FRS HFRSE was an English zoologist and ornithologist. Newton was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge University from 1866 to 1907. Among his numerous publications were a four-volume Dictionary of Birds (1893–6), entries on ornithology in the Encyclopædia Britannica while also an editor of the journal Ibis from 1865 to 1870. In 1900 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and the Gold Medal of the Linnaean Society. He founded the British Ornithologists Union.
Frederick DuCane GodmanDCL FRS FLS FGS FRGS FES FZS MRI FRHS was an English lepidopterist, entomologist and ornithologist. He was one of the twenty founding members of the British Ornithologists' Union. Along with Osbert Salvin, he is remembered for studying the fauna and flora of Central America.
Richard Bowdler Sharpe was an English zoologist and ornithologist who worked as curator of the bird collection at the British Museum of natural history. In the course of his career he published several monographs on bird groups and produced a multi-volume catalogue of the specimens in the collection of the museum. He described many new species of bird and also has had species named in his honour by other ornithologists including Sharpe's longclaw and Sharpe's starling.
Philip Lutley Sclater was an English lawyer and zoologist. In zoology, he was an expert ornithologist, and identified the main zoogeographic regions of the world. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London for 42 years, from 1860 to 1902.
Osbert Salvin was an English naturalist, ornithologist, and herpetologist best known for co-authoring Biologia Centrali-Americana (1879–1915) with Frederick DuCane Godman. This was a 52 volume encyclopedia on the natural history of Central America.
Howard Saunders was a British businessman, who later in life became a noted ornithologist, specialising in gulls and terns.
Percy Roycroft Lowe was an English surgeon and ornithologist.
Christopher Miles Perrins, is Emeritus Fellow of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and His Majesty's Warden of the Swans since 1993.
Henry Eeles Dresser was an English businessman and ornithologist.
Hugh Whistler, F.Z.S., M.B.O.U. was an English police officer and ornithologist who worked in India. He wrote one of the first field guides to Indian birds and documented the distributions of birds in notes in several journals apart from describing new subspecies.
William Lutley Sclater was a British zoologist and museum director. He was the son of Philip Lutley Sclater and was named after his paternal grandfather, also William Lutley Sclater.
Hans Friedrich Gadow was a German-born ornithologist who worked in Britain. His work on the classification of birds based on anatomical and morphological characters was influential and made use of by Alexander Wetmore in his classification of North American birds.
Reginald Ernest Moreau,, was an English civil servant who worked as an accountant in Africa and later contributed to ornithology. He made studies of clutch size in nesting birds, compared the life-histories of birds in different latitudes and was a pioneer in the introduction of quantitative approaches to the study of birds. He was also a long time editor of the ornithological journal Ibis.
The ash-winged antwren is a species of bird in subfamily Euchrepomidinae of family Thamnophilidae, the "typical antbirds". It is found in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, and possibly Peru.
The year 1880 in birding and ornithology.
The Godman-Salvin Medal is a medal of the British Ornithologists' Union awarded "to an individual as a signal honour for distinguished ornithological work." It was instituted in 1919 in the memory of Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin.
The Union Medal is a medal of the British Ornithologists' Union, given "in recognition of eminent services to ornithology and to the Union and ornithology." From 2019 it is to be known as the "Janet Kear Union Medal", after Janet Kear, with a new medal design.
Birds described in 1870 include Recurve-billed bushbird, Beautiful woodpecker, Philepittidae, Cantorchilus semibadius, Chinese barbet, White-naped seedeater, Belem curassow,
