Henry Eliot Howard

Henry Eliot Howard

Henry Eliot Howard JP (13 November 1873 - 26 December 1940) was an amateur English ornithologist, noted for being one of the first to describe territoriality behaviours in birds in a detailed manner.

Howard was born at Stone House near Kidderminster, second son of Henry Howard and Alice Gertrude Thomson. He studied at Stoke Poges, Eton and Mason Science College (the forerunner of the University of Birmingham), and eventually worked as a director of a major steelworks in Worcester.

He showed from his earliest childhood an intense love of natural history. It was not until 1914 that his first work, British Warblers, was fully published, having been issued in parts since 1907. Continually working on the theory of territory, he published Territory in Bird Life, illustrated by George Edward Lodge and Henrik Grönvold, in 1920 (a reissue in 1948 had an introduction by Julian Huxley and James Fisher), followed by An Introduction to the Study of Bird Behaviour, Nature of a Bird's World and lastly A Waterhen's World, in 1940. His books were published under the name "Eliot Howard".

He was a Justice of the Peace and for forty-five years a member of the British Ornithologists' Union.

Although his home was always in Worcestershire, much of his time was spent on the wild coast of Donegal and in the north west of Ireland shooting, fishing and studying natural history. He died at his home, Clareland, Stourport-on-Severn. He was attracted to the wild and beautiful area of Horn Head in the North West of Donegal, close to the Atlantic ocean, through his marriage in 1900 to Anne Elizabeth Frances Stewart whose family had lived there for many years. (The 1901 census of Ireland shows his wife was born in Donegal.)

His father, Henry was a manufacturing chemist and was son of John Eliot Howard. John's father was Luke Howard. The 1901 Census shows Henry Eiot as a, 'Iron tube manufacterer'.

His daughter, Esme Eleanor Howard, married the Reverend John William Fletcher Boughey, son of the Reverend Percy Fletcher Boughey and Elsie de Strange Herring, on 25 April 1940.