Adolphe Boucard named a Chilean hummingbird after Walter Burton in 1891 – payment in immortality, inside London’s vast, doomed Victorian feather trade
Author’s Note
Walter Burton caught my attention for one reason. I found two taxidermy cat heads at an auction, and suddenly, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. As I dug into his story, another name surfaced: Adolphe Boucard. Boucard was French, straight from Paris, and he was a force in London’s natural history trade in the 1890s. He and Walter had a business connection and I wanted to know all about it.
This essay is built from what I found that still survives, namely Boucard’s periodical, The Hummingbird and his Travels of a Naturalist, and the scattered records of Walter Burton’s life as an entomologist, naturalist, taxidermist, field collector, and Fellow of the Zoological Society of London.
Adolphe Boucard, Walter Burton and the Hummingbird that bound them
Two addresses – and they conjure up late-Victorian London.
191 Wardour Street: narrow, tucked into Soho, surrounded by furniture makers and curiosity dealers. The marketplace of the unusual, and close by, 225 High Holborn. Busier, more central, where barristers, print shops, and learned societies all pressed in together.
Between these two addresses, two men moved. Their lives were different, but both were woven into the Victorian economy of nature. Walter Burton was one. Taxidermist, entomologist, field collector, Fellow of the Zoological Society of London.
The other was Adolphe Boucard. French by birth. International by nature. He had that nineteenth-century confidence. If you acted like a naturalist, then you were one.
A mile and a quarter of London streets separated them. Twenty minutes on foot, if that. But the real distance wasn’t measured in steps. Boucard and Burton really did work together. Their worlds overlapped.
In March 1891, Boucard named a new Chilean hummingbird after Burton. Eustephanus Burtoni. Golden-headed, from the high Andes. Burton’s name, fixed in the scientific record. More permanent than any auction catalogue.
The shared world of Victorian natural history, science, commerce, and the feather trade are all tangled together. A world where a hummingbird was both specimen and currency.
A French Naturalist in a Soho World
Boucard’s life reads like a serialised adventure. He noticed everything, right from the start. Born in Dinan, France, in 1839. At eleven, he left Le Havre. Storms battered the ship as it crossed the Channel. He landed in Weymouth. Even then, he had a dealer’s eye. He clocked the price of apples, the sweetness of the ale. Later, he rounded Cape Horn under canvas. He arrived in San Francisco during the gold rush and spent a year catching hummingbirds alive in the hills above the city.
Decades later, in his book, Travels of a Naturalist, Boucard remembered his first glimpse of the Chilean coast. The Andes behind, the cold so sharp that both water and oil froze. He saw clouds of hummingbirds from the suburbs of Valparaiso. The same Eustephanus species he would later describe in London. One would carry Burton’s name.
Walter Burton’s life was quieter. Less wandering, although he went on expeditions, collected in the field, and wrote with the authority of someone who had done it all. His articles in The Hummingbird on skinning, packing, and field preparation are clear and practical. You can tell he’d done it a thousand times. Where Boucard wrote expansively, Burton was spare, exact, and never showy.
The Hummingbird as Currency
When Boucard named Eustephanus Burtoni for Walter Burton, it wasn’t just a tribute. It was currency. In Victorian science, naming a species was a gift, a recognition, a way to say: you belong. Your work is part of the story. Your name will last, even when the specimens and sale lists are gone.
The dedication itself is pure Boucard – formal, faintly grand, and entirely transactional:
“I dedicate this magnificent new species… to Mr Walter Burton, of London, who had the kindness to dispose of it in my favour.”
The deal was clear. Burton brought the specimen. Boucard gave him immortality. Both knew exactly what they were getting.
California, Mexico, and the Making of a Naturalist
Burton’s authority came from the workshop, from years of learning under his father, Henry J. Burton. Boucard’s came from the field. His early years in the Americas gave him something no London dealer could fake. He’d been where the birds lived, not as a gentleman, but as a working collector. His living depended on what he could catch, skin, preserve, and send home.
San Francisco in 1851 was still finding itself. Boucard arrived at fifteen. He stayed first on Mission Bay, then at the top of Stockton Street and there were just three houses there at the time, he remembered. The hills above, he said, were wild. That’s where he started catching hummingbirds alive. Sixty at once, all in one cage. The males fought so fiercely he had to separate them. He fed them flowers and insects, hoping to send them alive to Europe. They died at sea.
This episode describes the Boucard I came to see: the scientific curiosity, the commercial impulse, the optimism undimmed by failure.
From California he then moved south: Acapulco, Nicaragua, the tropical forests of Central America. His description of entering a virgin forest for the first time, written decades later, is unexpectedly moving. The boy who would become a dealer in tens of thousands of skins stood beneath the canopy and felt “the sad feeling of how little we are in this world in comparison with the works of the Creator.”
Between 1854 and 1867 he made at least two major expeditions into southern Mexico, collecting for Philip Sclater and others. Oaxaca, Chiapas, Vera Cruz, Guatemala, Honduras – these were not yet the well‑mapped ornithological territories they would become. Boucard’s specimens fed the great institutional collections of the age.
Burton, reading Boucard’s accounts in The Hummingbird, would have recognised the practicalities: the tin cases lined with camphor, the difficulty of keeping skins dry in the tropics, the constant battle against insects. The two men had lived different lives, but they spoke the same professional language.
Adolphe Boucard
Walter Burton (courtesy of Helen Wright)
High Holborn: The Clearing House of Empire
By 1891, when Boucard opened his London shop, he was something rare. A Frenchman who made England his base. A field collector turned dealer. Decorated by France, Spain, Portugal, and Cambodia. Yet he worked from a rented address in Holborn.
Boucard, Pottier & Co. was huge. Forty thousand bird and mammal skins. A hundred thousand insects. A hundred thousand shells. Ethnographic collections from New Guinea, Madagascar, Central America, West Africa. Glass eyes for birds and mammals, made right there. Taxidermy services from hummingbird to whale. Inspection galleries open to the public. I’ve searched for records of Pottier but found nothing. I suspect he was the financier, with shares and a cut of the profits.
The Journal That Tried to Be Everything
The Hummingbird launched in January 1891. Boucard used the periodical to show off everything he cared about, i.e. science, business, art, and his autobiography.
It was a hybrid. It couldn’t be anything else. New species descriptions sat next to feather auction results. Reviews of the British Museum’s galleries rubbed shoulders with ads for villas in San Remo. Boucard’s Travels of a Naturalist ran in serial. Burton’s practical taxidermy guides appeared under both their names.
The contradictions made the journal what it was. Science from a dealer. A commercial catalogue dressed up as a periodical. A personal memoir hidden inside a systematic work on hummingbirds.
Bibliographers didn’t like it. The Zoological Record got it wrong. The Zoologischer Anzeiger ignored most of it. Charles Kofoid, writing in The Condor in 1923, called this unfair. He was right. The science, especially the Genera of Hummingbirds, was solid. The commercial content is a goldmine for history. Its eccentricity made it real.
Burton anchored the journal. His voice was practical, plain, and sure. He gave it credibility where Boucard’s style sometimes wandered. Together, they balanced each other.
The Feather Trade and the Blindness of Abundance
You can’t talk about Boucard without talking about the feather trade. He wasn’t just close to it – he was in it. His business supplied the Plumassiers of London, Paris, and New York. Birds of paradise, riflebirds, tanagers, creepers – all passed through his hands on their way to the hat trade.
In The Hummingbird’s first essay, Boucard defended the trade. His confidence now feels catastrophic. He’d seen hummingbirds netted by the dozen in Oaxaca, sold for food. He’d watched swallows blacken the sky over Veracruz. He counted 1.5 million bird skins exported each year and decided it was nothing compared to the hundred million killed for food.
He was wrong, not in the details, but in the big picture.
The world he described that was endless and overflowing was already falling apart. The Eskimo Curlew was vanishing. The passenger pigeon, still in the millions, had just twenty years left. The huia, listed in his wanted column as ‘female, very rare,’ would be gone by 1907.
Boucard’s position is uncomfortable because he almost got it. He called for seasonal protection for breeding birds, a ban on egg-taking, and protection for insect-eaters. He saw the need for limits. But he couldn’t see that his own trade was destroying the world he loved.
Burton, who made his living from the same trade, must have seen the contradiction. Both men were trapped in a system older than they were, and one that would last long after. Birds were specimens, commodities, and decorations all at once.
The Naming of Burton
In this context, naming Eustephanus Burtoni was more than a friendly gesture. It was a rare moment of clarity in a world where science and commerce blurred together.
Burton was more than just a taxidermist on Wardour Street. By 1882, he was a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London. That put him in the scientific world as well as the practical one. He’d gone on expeditions with Bowyer-Bower, collected in the field, and wrote with the authority of someone who learned under open skies and workshop lamps alike. His series in The Hummingbird – how to kill a wounded eagle without ruining the feathers, how to skin a bird on your knee, how to pack tin cases for the tropics – reads like lived experience, not just instructions.
Boucard saw this. He knew Burton’s expertise was the foundation of Victorian natural history.
By giving Burton a hummingbird, Boucard put him in the permanent record. Not as a supplier. Not as a tradesman. As a naturalist. His name would last, even when the shops, sale lists, and collections were gone.
The Long Reckoning
In the end, the story of Boucard and Burton is not the story of two men so much as the story of a world in which a Victorian natural-history economy was built on curiosity, ambition, and a blindness to its own consequences. In uncovering Boucard, we see the embodiment of this ambiguity. He was a collector, a dealer, a publisher, a man who moved easily between the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the auction rooms of Stevens in Covent Garden. He defended the feather trade with a confidence that now reads as tragic, yet he also produced works of genuine scientific value, including the Catalogus Avium, the Genera of Hummingbirds, and his memoir, which remains one of the most vivid accounts of nineteenth-century field collecting.
Their partnership reminds us that Victorian science wasn’t just made in museums or universities. It was built in workshops, back rooms, in the hands of men who skinned birds on their knees and packed cases for the tropics. It grew in the exchanges between collectors and dealers, field naturalists and taxidermists, the man who found the bird and the man who named it.
The shops are gone. The trade has changed beyond recognition. The birds themselves have paid the highest price. But names endure, fixed in the literature, bright flecks of permanence in a world that has forgotten almost everything else.
This article is part of the Before the Glass section. Explore more research here →
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