Allan Octavian Hume, CB ICS was a British member of the Imperial Civil Service, a political reformer, ornithologist and botanist who worked in British India. He was the founder of the Indian National Congress. A notable ornithologist, Hume has been called "the Pope of Indian Ornithology" and, by those who found him dogmatic, "the Pope of Indian ornithology".
Thomas Caverhill Jerdon was a British physician, zoologist and botanist. He was a pioneering ornithologist who described numerous species of birds in India. Several species of plants and birds including Jerdon's baza, Jerdon's leafbird, Jerdon's bushlark, Jerdon's nightjar, Jerdon's courser, Jerdon's babbler and Jerdon's bush chat are named after him.
Colonel Samuel Richard Tickell was a British army officer, artist, linguist and ornithologist in India and Burma.
The stork-billed kingfisher, is a tree kingfisher which is widely but sparsely distributed in the tropical Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, from India to Indonesia. This kingfisher is resident throughout its range.
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himalayas, and several birds were named after him by others such as Edward Blyth. He was a scholar of Newar Buddhism and wrote extensively on a range of topics relating to linguistics and religion. He was an opponent of the British proposal to introduce English as the official medium of instruction in Indian schools.
Johannes Gerardus Keulemans was a Dutch bird illustrator. For most of his life he lived and worked in England, illustrating many of the best-known ornithology books of the nineteenth century.
The ashy drongo is a species of bird in the drongo family Dicruridae. It is found widely distributed across South and Southeast Asia with several populations that vary in the shade of grey, migration patterns and in the size or presence of white patches around the eye.
Jules Pierre Verreaux was a French botanist and ornithologist and a professional collector of and trader in natural history specimens. He was the brother of Édouard Verreaux and nephew of Pierre Antoine Delalande.
Ferdinand Stoliczka was a Moravian palaeontologist who worked in India on paleontology, geology and various aspects of zoology, including ornithology, malacology, and herpetology. He died of high altitude sickness in Murgo during an expedition across the Himalayas.
John Anderson was a Scottish anatomist and zoologist who worked in India as the curator of the Indian Museum, Calcutta.
Natural history in India has a long heritage with a recorded history going back to the Vedas. Natural history research in early times included the broad fields of palaeontology, zoology and botany. These studies would today be considered under field of ecology but in former times, such research was undertaken mainly by amateurs, often physicians, civil servants and army officers.
The black-naped oriole is a passerine bird in the oriole family that is found in many parts of Asia. There are several distinctive populations within the wide distribution range of this species and in the past the slender-billed oriole was included as a subspecies. Unlike the Indian golden oriole which only has a short and narrow eye-stripe, the black-naped oriole has the stripe broadening and joining at the back of the neck. Males and females are very similar although the wing lining of the female is more greenish. The bill is pink and is stouter than in the golden oriole.
Francis Day was an army surgeon and naturalist in the Madras Presidency who later became the Inspector-General of Fisheries in India and Burma. A pioneer ichthyologist, he described more than three hundred fishes in the two-volume work on The Fishes of India. He also wrote the fish volumes of the Fauna of British India series. He was also responsible for the introduction of trout into the Nilgiri hills, for which he received a medal from the French Societe d'Acclimatation. Many of his fish specimens are distributed across museums with only a small fraction deposited in the British Museum, an anomaly caused by a prolonged conflict with Albert Günther, the keeper of zoology there.
Walter Norman Koelz was an American zoologist and museum collector.
William Edwin Brooks was a civil engineer in India and an ornithologist. He later settled in Canada where his son Allan Cyril Brooks also became an ornithologist and bird artist of repute. Brooks was a pioneer of identifying species by their calls and he described several new species, particularly warblers in collaboration with Allan Octavian Hume. Brooks's leaf warbler is named after him.
The Andaman coucal or brown coucal is a species of non-parasitic cuckoo found in the Andamans, Coco and Table Islands. It is sometimes treated as a subspecies of the greater coucal. It is found mainly in forested habitats and thickly covered gardens.
Robert Christopher Tytler was a British soldier, naturalist and photographer. His second wife Harriet C. Tytler is well known for her work in photographing and documenting the monuments of Delhi and for her notes at the time of the 1857 revolt in India. Mt. Harriet in the Andamans is named after her. A species of bird, Tytler's leaf warbler, is named after him.
The plume-toed swiftlet is a small bird in the swift family Apodidae. It is found on some eastern Indian Ocean islands, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and lowland Borneo.
Frederik Adolph de Roepstorff was a Danish philologist who worked in the Andaman penal colony in India, in charge of the Nicobar Islands, where he was shot dead by a convict. He studied the languages of Andaman and Nicobar tribes and collected numerous specimens of fauna and flora. The Andaman masked owl was named after him by Hume.
