The great Victorian ornithologist who gave his name to Hume's Warbler - an Asian vagrant to British shores

                                                       

Hume's Warbler is similar to Yellow-browed Warbler but greyer - photo: J.M. Garg/ Wikimedia Commons 

THE annual arrival of a handful of Hume's Warblers on our shores prompts a reminder of the mishap that befell the man who first identified it as a species in its own right.

This November, UK records of this Asian vagrant include  birds in eastern England and Shetland - a long distance from the gardens, orchards and deciduous forests of India where they customarily spend winter.

British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume spent most of his career as a highly effective civil servant in India, also  finding time to study the country's forestry, mineralogy, art, history and wildlife, especially its birds.

In 1873, he published Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, then, six years later (jointly with C.H. T. Marshall), Game Birds of India, Burma and Ceylon. 

He also amassed (and later bequeathed to London's Natural History Museum) the skins, eggs and nests of an incredible diversity of Indian avifauna including 1,155 owls, 2,830 other birds of prey, 813 parrots, 2,120 sandgrouse, 2,415 waders and almost 2, 0000 sunbirds and white-eyes.

But then disaster . . .

In 1885, while on an extended expedition that took him away from his home, his servants mistook correspondence and manuscripts for a further book to be waste paper and dispatched them to a bazaar to be sold.

Hume's biographers, Barbara and Richard Mearns, say: "Twenty-five years work had been lost at a stroke.

"He said little about the tragedy but it killed his interest in ornithology."

In 1894, four years after the death of his wife, Hume returned to England and settled at a house in Kingswood Drive between Dulwich and Sydenham where he pursued an interest and campaigned on behalf of Liberal election candidates.

Although remaining a member of the British Ornithologists' Union, his interest switched to wild flowers, hunting for plants across England and Wales and founding the South London Botanic Institute.

Hume died, aged 83, on July 31, 1912, and his ashes are interred  at Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey.

Other birds named after him include Hume's Tawny Owl and Hume's Wheatear.

* November 2026 sightings of Hume's Warbler in Britain so far include birds in Suffolk, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Fetlar (Shetland).                                         

Allan Hume much of whose precious research was lost