On William Henry Hudson

There’s a story that William Henry Hudson, broke and adrift in London, once slept on the spot in Hyde Park where a memorial and bird sanctuary was later raised in his honor, about a year after his death in 1922. Some doubt it. I choose to believe it, if only for the felicitous circularity it brings to the narrative of his life: from good times to bad and back to good. By chance one day I discovered that shady enclosure and everything I had stored in my memory about that man who loved birds, championed their protection, and wrote many books about them and other creatures poured forth.

Sleeping on the ground was nothing new for Hudson. Born and raised on the Argentine pampas, he spent many nights on the open plain, many days tracking its most distant reaches, virtually fused to the animal that conveyed him: “When riding by night I used to enjoy lying back on my horse till my head and shoulders rested well on his back; and in this position, which practice can make both safe and comfortable, gaze up into the starry sky.”

I first encountered Hudson’s work forty years ago while on the Buenos Aires Herald, Argentina’s venerable English language daily. A copy editor, a reticent Yorkshire man, handed me The Naturalist in La Plata, one of Hudson’s books on the behavior of birds, mammals, and insects. This book, published in 1892, rescued Hudson from the damp grass of London’s parks and awoke readers to the value of his work. More was to come to buttress that first success: Idle Days in Patagonia (1893), Green Mansions (1904), The Purple Land (1904), Birds of La Plata (1920), and especially Far Away and Long Ago (1918), the autobiography of his youth.

Even today I can recall many of Hudson’s extraordinary observations; they constitute a rich inventory of my non sequiturs with which I have glazed the eyes of many friends over the years. What follows are my versions of Hudson—not his exact words: Did you know the puma will never attack a human being, not even to defend itself? Did you know that birds in some flocks tend to their injured members, while cattle who are injured are often attacked by the rest of the herd? Did you know that guanaco in southern Patagonia have a place where they go to die? Nobody knows why. And so on.

Hudson’s was an out-of-the-way beginning of a life. He was born, as he put it, in a house “quaintly named ‘Los Veinte-cinco Ombues,’ which means ‘the Twenty-five Ombu Trees,’ there being just twenty-five of these indigenous trees—gigantic in size and standing wide apart in a row about four hundred yards long.” This house, with a crystal stream called Las Conchitas nearby, was on an estancia south of Buenos Aires in a region called Quilmes, today an industrial suburb. Hudson’s parents were American-born New Englanders. They emigrated in 1833 to South America, hoping to make their way raising animals in the grasslands. Hudson’s father, Daniel, was born in Massachusetts; his grandfather came from Devon, England. Hudson’s mother, Caroline, claimed links to the Mayflower.

This couple, Anglophiles both, probably owing to the influence of Daniel’s English father, sought to inculcate this passion in their six Argentine-born children, an effort that most deeply affected William: it convinced him that England was his natural home, a notion possibly encouraged by Anglo-A rgentines and expatriates encountered in the Quilmes region. When Hudson departed for England in 1874, at the age of thirty-two, not long after his parents had died, he told his young brother Albert he was “going home.”

Home would prove less than welcoming.

Hudson’s most enduring book, Green Mansions, a fantastical romance at once both silly and sublime, like the opera sometimes is, has never gone out of print. Set in the jungles of Venezuela, it is an allegory, a virtuoso’s display of style, a deployment of a vast vocabulary that, harnessed to his imaginative...