John Alexander Harvie-Brown

Perhaps his most famous expedition was with Henry Seebohm to the lower reaches of the Pechora River in 1875, when the eggs of the grey plover and the little stint were discovered.

For many years Harvie-Brown cruised each summer among the islands of the Scottish coast in his yacht the "Shiantelle" (built in 1887 in Fraserburgh).

[8] In 1880 Alfred Newton persuaded the British Association to sponsor a committee for the study of bird migration all over the world but especially along the coasts of England and Scotland.

Harvie-Brown, John Cordeaux, and W. Eagle Clarke were among the most important contributors to the committee's effort to recruit the keepers of lighthouses and lightvessels to make and record observations of bird migration.

For this reason Harvie Brown wrote a paper, addressed to "the lighthouse keepers of the English Channel, and to the local ornithologists of the counties abutting thereone."