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Description: | Colonel Laurence Austine Waddell (1854-1938) was a soldier, doctor, historian and explorer. He was born in Dumbarton and trained in medicine at the University of Glasgow. He spent the bulk of his professional career in northern India, in the Indian Medical Service with spells serving in the British Army. This resulted in him travelling widely in Sikkim, Assam, Bhutan, Darjeeling district and into Tibet. He is best known as a scholar for his works on the history of Buddhism and on Tibet and its customs in general. He was also interested in natural history and appears to have collected most of his animal specimens in a fourteen year period from 1884. His ornithological observations on The Birds of Sikkim' were published in The Gazetteer of Sikkim' in 1894.
There are over a 1500 bird skins in the collection today with around 130 non-passerine species listed on the Hunterian on-line catalogue so far. Each specimen bears Waddell's characteristic label giving some morphometrics, locality and altitude, date of collection, species name and vernacular name. The latter presumably a reflection of Waddell's wider interest in philology (the study of languages). Though natural history was not his main scholarly interest the work on birds of Sikkim was an important contribution to understanding the biodiversity of this area. A species of giant babbler 'Babax (Garrulax) waddelli' (family Timaliidae) was named in his honour by Henry Dresser in 1905. The type specimens of this species are in Manchester Museum. Some other Waddell material is also in the Natural History Museum, London.
He donated his collection of bird skins (plus a few mammals and some insects, also extant) to the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow in 1894. In a subsequent gift in 1939, he bequeathed his important personal library and papers pertaining to his studies of ancient Asiatic culture and religion to Special Collections at Glasgow University Library. | Subjects: | Waddell Sikkim birds India | Source: | Hunterian Museum | Address: | University of Glasgow,
University Avenue,
G12 8QQ | Creator: | Maggie Reilly | Contributor: | L.A. Waddell | Identifier: | C-0059 |
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