John Gould FRS was an English ornithologist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrated by plates produced by his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists, including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. He has been considered the father of bird study in Australia and the Gould League in Australia is named after him. His identification of the birds now nicknamed "Darwin's finches" played a role in the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Gould's work is referenced in Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species.
Henry Constantine Richter was an English zoological illustrator who produced a very large number of skillful coloured lithographs of birds and mammals, mainly for the scientific books of the renowned English 19th century ornithologist John Gould.
Robert David FitzGerald was an Irish-Australian surveyor, ornithologist, botanist and poet.
Elizabeth Gould, née Coxen (1804—1841), was a British artist and illustrator, married to naturalist and author John Gould. She produced many illustrations and lithographs for ornithological works, including plates in Darwin's The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle and the Goulds' seminal work The Birds of Australia.
The Birds of Australia was a book written by John Gould and published in seven volumes between 1840 and 1848, with a supplement published between 1851 and 1869. It was the first comprehensive survey of the birds of Australia and included descriptions of 681 species, 328 of which were new to Western science and were first described by Gould.
Henrik Grønvold was a Danish naturalist and artist, known for his illustrations of birds. Grønvold was among the last natural history illustrators to publish lithographs.
The Mammals of Australia is a three-volume work written and published by John Gould between 1845–63. It contains 182 illustrations by the author and its artist H. C. Richter. It was intended to be a complete survey of the novel species of mammals, such as the marsupials, discovered in the colonies of Australia.
Hubert Massey Whittell OBE was a British army officer, and later an Australian farmer and ornithologist who compiled a history and bibliography of ornithology in Australia from its origins until the mid-20th century.
The Literature of Australian Birds is a book published in 1954 by Paterson Brokensha in Perth, Western Australia. Its full title is The Literature of Australian Birds: A History and a Bibliography of Australian Ornithology. It was authored by Hubert Massey Whittell. It is in large octavo format and contains some 900 pages, two separately paginated parts bound in one volume in brown buckram. It contains a coloured frontispiece of a drawing of the superb lyrebird by Lieutenant-General Thomas Davies from 1799, with another 31 black-and-white plates bound between Parts 1 and 2.
The Birds of Western Australia is a book first published in 1948 by Patersons Press Ltd in Perth, Western Australia. Its full title was originally A Handbook of the Birds of Western Australia , though with the publication of the 5th edition only the shorter form was used. It was authored by Dominic Serventy and Hubert Whittell. It was issued in octavo format and contains 372 pages bound in blue buckram with a dustjacket illustrated with a painting of Australian pelicans by Harley Webster. It contains a coloured frontispiece of paintings of the heads of Meliphaga honeyeaters, with numerous black-and-white drawings and maps scattered through the text. The second edition (1951) contained colour plates by Olive Seymour.
Rawnsley's bowerbird, also known as Rawnsley's satin bird or the blue regent, is a rare intergeneric hybrid between a satin bowerbird and a regent bowerbird.
Silvester Diggles was an Australian artist and musician of British origin, as well as being a noted amateur ornithologist and entomologist.
The Birds of Australia is a 12-volume ornithological handbook covering the birds of Australia. It was the second of three monumental illustrated works dealing with the avifauna of the continent and was published midway between the other two, the first being Gould's identically titled The Birds of Australia (1840-1848), and the third the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (1990-2006).
Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots is an 1832 book containing 42 hand-coloured lithographs by Edward Lear. He produced 175 copies for sale to subscribers as a part-publication, which were later bound as a book. Lear started painting parrots in 1830 when he was 18 years old, and to get material for his book he studied live birds at the London Zoo and in private collections. The latter included those of Edward Smith Stanley, later 13th Earl of Derby, who had a large menagerie at Knowsley Hall, and Benjamin Leadbeater, a taxidermist and trader in specimens. Lear drew onto lithographic plates for printing by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, who was known for the quality of his reproductions of fine art.
William Matthew Hart (1830-1908) was an Irish-born English bird illustrator and lithographer who worked for John Gould.
Birds described in 1869 include Hartlaub's spurfowl, subantarctic shearwater, Himalayan vulture, Palani laughingthrush, Anchieta's barbet and the long-tailed myna.
Birds described in 1870 include Recurve-billed bushbird, Beautiful woodpecker, Philepittidae, Cantorchilus semibadius, Chinese barbet, White-naped seedeater, Belem curassow,
Birds described in 1875 include the Anjouan sparrowhawk, Caucasian grouse, Nelson's sparrow, yellow-capped pygmy parrot, red-tailed shrike, spotted catbird, spectacled barwing, tit berrypecker, bridled honeyeater and Taczanowski's tinamou.
Birds described in 1877 include the giant ibis, black-and-yellow phainoptila, Cebu flowerpecker, Drakensberg prinia, Finsch's euphonia, lava heron, Manus friarbird, Palawan tit, plain-backed antpitta, rufous-fronted tailorbird and Walden's hornbill.
