Henry Seebohm (Born 1832) was notably the author of The History of British Birds with its accurate and highly detailed lithographs of bird eggs. A noted British ornithologist, zoologist and botanist, Seebohm travelled widely for his interests. Seebohm was the oldest son of Benjamin Seebohm, a wool merchant at Horton Grange, Bradford. Seebohm 's mother Estther Wheeler was a granddaughter of William Tuke. The family had moved to England from Bad Pyrmont in Germany. The family was active in the Society of Friends and Seebohm schooled within the community in York. Seebohm worked initially in a grocery as an assistant but later moved to Sheffield where he became a steel manufacturer. He became interested in natural history at school and continued to spend his spare time studying birds on his journeys.
Seebohm travelled widely visiting Scandinavia, Greece, South Africa, and Turkey. His expeditions included a visit to Heligoland along with John Alexander Harvie-Brown as well as the lower Pechora River in 1875. In 1877 he joined Joseph Wiggins to Siberia. Seebohm’s expeditions to Siberia’s Yenisey tundra were described in his two books Siberia in Europe and Siberia in Asia. The two books were combined in The Birds of Siberia - published posthumously in 1901. Seebohm was one of the first European ornithologists to accept the American trinomial system to classify sub-species. His other publications included A Monograph of the Turdidae, The Birds of the Japanese Empire, and The Geographical Distribution of the family Charadriidae. He bequeathed his collection of bird-skins to the British Museum.
