Harry Thom Payne

Harry Thom Payne was an American writer born in 1844 and remembered today for Game Birds and Game Fishes of the Pacific Coast, a guide published in Los Angeles in 1913. The book was written for hunters and anglers rather than specialists, with straightforward descriptions of the species found along the Pacific Coast.

In the book’s own introduction, Payne presents himself as someone drawing on more than half a century of experience in the field and stream. That gives his writing an appealing firsthand quality: it is practical, observant, and shaped by lived time outdoors rather than by academic study.

A surviving memorial record identifies him as a Los Angeles newspaper man and gives his lifespan as 1844–1932. Beyond that, biographical details are scarce, but his book has endured as a small, vivid record of sporting life and natural history in the American West.