Born in the Argentine pampas where he roamed free in his youth, he observed bird life and collected specimens for the Smithsonian Institution.

He was born and lived his first years in a small estancia called "Los Veinte-cinco Ombues"[1] which was on the banks of the Arroyo Conchitas stream which flows into the Plata river in what is now Ingeniero Allan, Florencio Varela, Argentina.

In 1870, he wrote his a series of nine letters on the ornithology of Buenos Ayres that were published by Philip Sclater in the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society.

Hudson saw the pampas being destroyed by European immigrants[citation needed] and in April 1874 he boarded the steamer Ebro to England.

He then sought to work as a genealogy researcher for a Chester Waters who turned out to be deeply indebted and unable to pay.

In 1876, he married singer Emily (1829-1921)[9] daughter of John Hanmer Wingrave[10] and lived in her home at Southwick Crescent where she ran boarding houses.

He wrote several books including a two-volume work on Argentine Ornithology (1888), Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), and The Naturalist in La Plata (1892).

His books on the English countryside, all of them set in Wiltshire, including Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909), and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

He was a supporter of the Society for the Protection of Birds from its early days and was often the only man who sat in the meetings organized by Eliza Phillips.

[14] Hudson became a British citizen in 1900[15] and in 1901 he received a Civil list pension of £150 per year for his writings on natural history.

[16] Hudson was more than six feet tall and he loved to talk to people from rural working classes and would live among them during his travels in the countryside.

Other works of fiction included The Purple Land (1904), A Crystal Age (1906), Tales of the Pampas (1916), and A Little Boy Lost (1905).

[2] At the headquarters of the RSPB in Sandy, Bedfordshire, a portrait of Hudson painted by Frank Brooks hangs over the fireplace noting his role in the early days of the Society and for his bequest.

[13] Ernest Hemingway referred to Hudson's The Purple Land (1885) in his novel The Sun Also Rises, and to Far Away and Long Ago in his posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986).

"[29] James Rebanks' 2015 book The Shepherd's Life about a Lake District farmer was inspired by Hudson's work of the same name: "But even more than Orwell or Hemingway, W.H.