David Landsborough (11 August 1779 – 12 September 1854) was a Scottish minister of the Free Church of Scotland and noted amateur naturalist.
Landsborough was a typical parson-naturalist,[2] who, in addition to his clerical duties, and while maintaining his scholarship by reading some Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, or Italian daily, early commenced the study of the natural history of his parish and that of the neighbouring island of Arran.
[1] For many years he kept a daily register of the temperature, wind and weather, and noted the first flowering of plants and the arrival of migratory birds.
[1] In 1849 Landsborough was elected an associate of the Linnean Society,[8] and in the following year he was mainly instrumental in the establishment of the Ayrshire Naturalists' Club.
In 1852, when upwards of seventy-three, he visited Gibraltar and Tangier, returning by way of the Balearic Isles, Marseilles, Genoa, Turin, and Paris.
Landsborough was most assiduous in visiting the sick and dying, but was himself attacked by the disease, and succumbed, after a very brief illness at Saltcoats on 12 September 1854.
Landsborough is said to have discovered nearly seventy species of plants and animals new to Scotland, and thus well earned the title of 'the Gilbert White of Ardrossan.'
In addition to the works above mentioned, of which the Popular History of British Seaweeds reached a third edition in 1857, Landsborough published 'Ayrshire Sketches, or Memoirs of J.
His contributions to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and to The Zoologist deal with phosphorescence, the habits of the rook, and the pliocene and post-pliocene deposits at Stevenston.