Colonel Arthur Hay, 9th Marquess of Tweeddale, known before 1862 as Lord Arthur Hay and between 1862 and 1876 as Viscount Walden, was a Scottish solider and ornithologist. He was President of the Zoological Society of London from 1868 . He had a private collection of birds, insects, reptiles and mammals, and employed Carl Bock to travel to Maritime Southeast Asia and collect specimens. Tweeddale described about 40 species collected by Bock for the first time and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1871.
Sir Hugh Steuart Gladstone of Capenoch was a Scottish ornithologist and landowner. In 1920 he became Chairman of the Wild Birds Advisory (Scotland) Committee, serving this role until death. In 1933, he was one of eleven people involved in the appeal that led to the foundation of the British Trust for Ornithology
George Ernest Shelley was an English geologist and ornithologist. He was the nephew of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. His books included A Monograph of the Cinnyridae, or Family of Sun Birds (1878), A Handbook to the Birds of Egypt (1872) and The Birds of Africa (5 volumes, 1896-1912)
George Dawson Rowley was an English amateur ornithologist who published a series called Ornithological Miscellany in which he reprinted notes on bird studies of the time
John Gould was an English ornithologist. He published a number of monographs on birds, illustrate by plates produced by his wife, Elizabeth Gould, and several other artists including Edward Lear, Henry Constantine Richter, Joseph Wolf and William Matthew Hart. 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
William Homan Thorpe was Professor of Animal Ethology at the University of Cambridge, and a British zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist
Guy Mountfort was an English advertising executive, amateur ornithologist and conservationist. He is known for writing A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, published in 1954. In 1961 he created the World Wide Fund for Nature (then the World Wildlife Fund) with Victor Stolan, Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Peter Scott and Max Nicholson. In 1956 he led an expedition to the Coto Donana with the resulting Book Portrait of a Wilderness illustrated by Eric Hosking. In 1963 he led a party of naturalists which made the first ornithological expedition to Azraq in Jordan. The expedition's recommendations led to the creation of the Azraq Wetland Reserve and other protected areas. He was appointed an OBE in 1970, for services to ornithology. In 1972 he led the campaign to save the Bengal Tiger, persuading Indira Ghandi to create nine tiger reserves in India, with eight others in Nepal and Bangladesh
Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, the study of animal behaviour. He developed an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth. Lorenz studied instinctive behaviour in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he investigated the principle of imprinting. Although Lorenz did not discover the topic, he became widely known for his descriptions of imprinting as an instinctive bond. Lorenz's work was interrupted by the onset of World War II and in 1941 he was recruited into the German Army as a medic. In 1944, he was sent to the Eastern Front where he was captured by the Soviet Red Army and spent four years as a German Prisoner of War in Soviet Armenia. Lorenz wrote numerous books, some of which, such as King Solomon's Ring, On Aggression, and Man Meets Dog, became popular reading
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 (macronyx sharpei) and Sharpe's starling (poeopters sharpii). He was Clerk in Charge of the Library at the Zoological Society of London 1867-1872. Sharpe founded the British Ornithologists' Club in 1882 and edited its bulletin. He was a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London and the Linnean Society
Alfred 'Chips' Ezra was a British breeder and keeper of birds. He built up a collection of rare birds at Foxwarren Park in Southern England. He was President of the Avicultural Society and a prominent member of the Zoological Society of London, which awarded him a gold medal