John Henry Gurney Sr.

John Henry Gurney (4 July 1819 – 20 April 1890) was an English banker, amateur ornithologist, and Liberal Party politician of the Gurney family. Life Gurney was the only son of Joseph John Gurney of Earlham Hall, Norwich, Norfolk. At the age of ten he was sent to a private tutor at Leytonstone near the Epping Forest, where he met Henry Doubleday, and commenced his first natural history collection. From there he moved to the Friends' School at Tottenham, and whilst there met William Yarrell. At the age of seventeen he joined the family's banking business in Norwich. Gurney published a number of articles in The Zoologist on the birds of Norfolk, for instance 'An Account of the Birds of Norfolk', with W.R. Fisher (1846-1848). Gurney also commenced a collection of birds of prey. In 1864 he published Part I. of his Descriptive Catalogue of this collection, and in 1872 he edited The Birds of Damara Land (Damaraland, South-West Africa) from the notes of his friend Charles John Andersson. Between 1875 and 1882 he produced a series of notes in The Ibis on the first volume of the Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum, and in 1884 brought out a List of Diurnal Birds of Prey, with References and Annotations. The archives of Cambridge University Museum of Zoology contains five volumes of correspondence between Alfred Newton and Gurney, who was a founding member of the Norfolk Naturalists Trust.