Becoming acquainted with Roderick Murchison he was introduced to William Hamilton (1805–1867) and accompanied him in 1835 on a journey through Asia Minor, the Thracian Bosporus and the island of Zante.

With Murchison he read before the Geological Society an important paper On the Upper Formations of the New Red Sandstone System in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire (Trans.

He was author likewise of ornithological memoirs communicated to the Zoological Society, the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and the British Association.

[4][5] This report is the earliest formal codification of the principle of priority, which represents the fundamental guiding precept that preserves the stability of zoological nomenclature.

In 1846 he settled at Oxford, and two years later he issued in conjunction with Alexander Gordon Melville a work on The Dodo and its kindred (1848).

In the following year, after attending the meeting of the British Association at Hull, he went to examine the geological strata visible in cuttings on the Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway near Retford.

While travelling in 1835 he discovered the olive-tree warbler on the island of Zante, and the cinereous bunting in the vicinity of İzmir in western Turkey.

His name was honoured in the name of a bird endemic to N. Borneo, Copsychus stricklandii Motley & Dillwyn (1855)[9] as well as the brachiopod genus Stricklandia.