George Latimer Bates

George Griswold Latimer Bates (March 21, 1863, Abingdon, Illinois US – January 31, 1940 Chelmsford UK), LL.D., M.B.O.U.

He lived in central Africa and travelled widely, collecting specimens of natural history from which numerous new species were described.

[2] In 1895, he went to West Africa ostensibly to work in a Presbyterian Mission but primarily to collect natural history specimens.

Some of the natives believed that he sought to collect male and female specimens so as to populate his own country with the bird species.

[2][6][7][8] Bates left Africa and moved to live in England in Little Watham, Essex in 1928 and settled in a home that he called 'Timbuctoo'.

[9] In 1930, he made a collecting trip to Sierra Leone for the Natural History Museum, and also visited Guinea and Mount Nimba.

Bates trained Philby's servant to skin and had an Indian clerk, Mahbub Elahi Kazi, collect specimens with a 16-bore gun.

Because of this,Norman Kinnear influenced the Bombay Natural History Society to send a skinner named Fateh Khan to Arabia.

[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] His unpublished manuscript on the Birds of Arabia was later used by Richard Meinertzhagen who added various embellishments[20] and gave little credit to Bates.