[1] He became a zoological illustrator, well known in the nineteenth century for his many engravings for major works of natural history including Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871)[2] and Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869).

His address is 89 Stanhope Street, Hampstead Road, [London] N.W.Wood was interested in insect camouflage, and Wallace again cites him in his 1895 book Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, writing that the orangetip butterfly's underwing pattern "completely assimilates with the flower heads and renders the creature very difficult to be seen".

[7] The English broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough notes that in Wallace's Malay Archipelago, Wood, like earlier illustrators of the lesser bird-of-paradise, showed the male's posture wrongly, with the plumes appearing to bush out from above the wings.

[12] One of the new drawings was a "Side view of male Argus pheasant, while displaying before the female"; Wood based the drawing on his own careful observation of the birds in the London zoological gardens, and was praised for it by William Bernhardt Tegetmeier, the natural history editor of The Field magazine, for which Wood often worked, as "the first correct delineation of the display".

The "double-banded" refers to the only known part of the bird, feathers with a doubled pattern found in a milliner's shop as hat decoration.