Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen was a British soldier, intelligence officer and ornithologist
Jean Théodore Delacour was an American ornithologist and aviculturalist of French origin. He was renowned for not only discovering but also rearing some of the rarest birds in the world. He established very successful aviaries twice in his life, stocked with birds from around the world, including those that he obtained on expeditions to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. His first aviary in Villers-Bretonneux was destroyed in the First World War, and the second one that he established at Clères was destroyed in the Second World War. He moved to the United States of America where he worked on avian systematics and was one of the founders of the International Committee for Bird Protection (later BirdLife International). One of the birds he discovered was the imperial pheasant, later identified as a hybrid between the Vietnamese pheasant and the silver pheasant
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
William Homan Thorpe was Professor of Animal Ethology at the University of Cambridge, and a British zoologist, ethologist and ornithologist
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
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
John James Yealland was a British aviculturalist and ornithologist. He helped Sir Peter Scott found the Wildfowl Trust. He accompanied Gerald Durrell on his first animal collecting expedition to the British Cameroon in 1947-1948. He went to become the Curator of Birds at London Zoo
Employed by the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology
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
Friedrich Hermann Otto Finsch was a German ethnographer, naturalist and colonial explorer. He is known for a two-volume monograph on the parrots of the world which earned him a doctorate. He also wrote on the people of New Guinea and was involved in plans for German colonisation in Southeast Asia. Several species of bird (such as Oenanthe finschii, Alophoixus finschii, Psittacula finschii) are named after him as also the town of Finschhafen in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea and a crater on the moon