William Henry Hudson (4 August 1841 – 18 August 1922), known in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, was an Anglo-Argentine author, naturalist and ornithologist. Born in the Argentine pampas where he roamed free in his youth, he observed bird life and collected specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. The Patagonian birds Knipolegus hudsoni and Asthenes hudsoni are named after him. He would later write about life in Patagonia that drew special admiration for his style. His most popular work Green Mansions (1904), a romance set in the Venezuelan forest, inspired a Hollywood movie and several other works.
Life Hudson was the fourth child of Daniel Hudson (1804–1868) and his wife Caroline Augusta née Kemble (1804–1859), United States settlers of English and Irish origin. His paternal grandfather was from Clyst Hydon in Devon. He was born and lived his first years in a small estancia called "Los Veinte-cinco Ombues" which was on the banks of the Arroyo Conchitas stream which flows into the Plata river in what is now Ingeniero Allan, Florencio Varela, Argentina.
In 1846, the family established at a pulpería further south, "Las Acacias", in the surroundings of Chascomús, not far from the lake of the same name. In this natural environment, Hudson spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier. He was taught by three tutors who lived on the ranch. He became keenly interested in the life of the pampas, and grew up with gaucho herders, native Indians, settlers with whom he explored the pampas and developed a special love for Patagonia. At the age of 15 Hudson suffered from a serious bout of typhus fever and still later suffered from rheumatic fever. At 16 he read Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne and was deeply influenced to study natural history. In 1859, his mother, a devout Christian, died, and in the same year he read Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. From 1866, he collected bird skins for S. F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution but he would note later the glory of birds in life and the ugliness of taxidermy. In 1866, he also served in the Argentinian army during the war with Paraguay. He later collected insect specimens for Hermann Burmeister in Buenos Aires and sent bird specimens to the Zoological Society of London from 1870. In 1870, he wrote a series of nine letters on the ornithology of Buenos Ayres to Philip Sclater and published by Sclater in the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society. In his third letter of 1870, Hudson challenged some of Darwin's statements about birds in Patagonia. Darwin noted that the woodpecker Colaptes campestris occurred on the pampas where not a tree grew and Hudson argued that there were indeed trees on the La Plata and that in much vaster grassland areas, the woodpecker was never found. Darwin responded, accepting that he may have been mistaken in some of his observations, but that there was no wilful error and clarified the location where he had made his observations. In 1872 Hudson sent specimens of birds from Patagonia, including a species Sclater would describe and name after Hudson as Cnipolegus hudsoni (spelling used in the paper). Hudson was initially sceptical about evolution but he would later be a grudging evolutionist.
Hudson saw the pampas being destroyed by European immigrants and in April 1874 he boarded the steamer Ebro for England. He slept in Hyde Park after arrival and struggled to find employment. He met John Gould in the hope of finding work but found a cold response from Gould who was ill and the sight of dead hummingbirds all around sickened Hudson. He then sought to work as a genealogy researcher for Chester Waters who was deep in debt and unable to pay. In 1876, he married singer Emily (1829–1921) daughter of John Hanmer Wingrave and lived in her home at Southwick Crescent (now Hyde Park Crescent), Paddington in London, where she ran a boarding house. They later moved to rented rooms and she tried to make a living by giving music lessons. They later moved to a larger three-storey house in Bayswater that Emily inherited. They lived in a flat and rented out the others which paid back their debts. They had no children. Hudson struggled to make a living through writing and among the few that he managed to write was an article in a women's magazine in 1876 that he wrote under the pseudonym Maud Merryweather. In 1880, he met Morley Roberts and through his connections he was able to contribute stories to magazines. He wrote several books including a two-volume work on Argentine Ornithology (1888), Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), and The Naturalist in La Plata (1892). He began to travel in England and wrote Nature in Downland (1900). His books on the English countryside, some of them set in the southern counties of Hampshire and Wiltshire, included Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909), and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Hudson was a supporter of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) from its early days and was often the only man who sat in the meetings organized by Eliza Phillips. He later wrote some pamphlets for the organisation in 1898 against the trade in plumes. Hudson became a British citizen in 1900 and in 1901 he received a Civil list pension of £150 per year for his writings on natural history. This was made possible by the influence of Sir Edward and his wife Lady Dorothy Grey.
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