author
Thomas Nuttall
1786–1859
An English-born naturalist who crossed a young United States collecting plants, birds, and specimens, he became one of the key explorers of North American nature in the early 1800s. His work helped introduce many readers and scientists to the continent’s flora and wildlife.
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About the author
Born in Yorkshire in 1786, Thomas Nuttall trained as a printer before his passion for botany pulled him in a different direction. After arriving in the United States in the early nineteenth century, he came under the influence of Philadelphia naturalists and quickly built a reputation as a gifted collector and observer of plants and animals.
Nuttall traveled widely through regions that were still little known to European American science, including the Mississippi Valley, the Arkansas country, and the Pacific Northwest. He described many North American species and published important works on botany and ornithology, including The Genera of North American Plants and A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada.
He later served as a professor of botany at Harvard, though he is often remembered most vividly as a field naturalist: patient, curious, and willing to endure difficult journeys in search of new knowledge. Nuttall died in England in 1859, but his name still lives on in species and place names across North America.