Henry Dresser senior was in business with his father-in-law, Robert Garbutt of Hull, who traded with Hackman and Co of Vyborg (Viipuri) in southern Finland.

Henry Dresser senior purchased a large timber sawmill business, the Lancaster Mills, near Musquash in New Brunswick in 1848.

His father intended him to take over the family business in the Baltic timber trade so took him out of school in Bromley and sent him to Ahrensburg in 1852, to learn German and in 1854, to Gefle and Uppsala to study Swedish.

[3] In 1863, during the American Civil War, he travelled to Texas via the Rio Grande on behalf of Liverpool and Manchester businessmen, taking a cargo of blankets, quinine and other goods in short supply to be sold and purchased raw cotton with the proceeds.

[4][5][6] Dresser was a leading figure in ornithological circles: he was elected a Member of the British Ornithologists' Union in 1865 and served as its secretary from 1882 to 1888.

Dresser had privileged access to the notes of many of the most prominent ornithologists, such as Russian Sergei Buturlin, who discovered the main breeding grounds of Ross's gull in 1905 in the delta of the Kolyma River in remote north-east Siberia.

[8] Dresser left England to live in Cannes for the benefit of his health; he died in Monte Carlo on 28 November 1915.