Sidney William Jackson

Sidney William Jackson (12 June 1873 – 30 September 1946) was an Australian naturalist and field ornithologist with a special interest in oology, who was also a skilled photographer and taxidermist.

Jackson was born in Brisbane, Queensland, and educated at Toowoomba Grammar School and in Grafton, New South Wales. From his youth he developed an interest in birds and in collecting their eggs. Based in Grafton, for many years he worked as a commercial traveller, giving him the opportunity to build up a large collection of birds' eggs. Although his field activities were mainly focussed on bird and egg specimens, he also collected land snails and botanical specimens. He was a skillful tree-climber and developed, with the help of his brother Frank, techniques for climbing trees, using leg-spikes and rope-ladders, as aids to egg-collecting.

Jackson contributed several papers to the RAOU journal The Emu. He was a diligent diarist, correspondent, photographer and talented sketcher, whose diaries, as well as much of his correspondence, photographic negatives and drawings, eventually found their way to the National Library of Australia in Canberra. He also authored a book, Egg Collecting and Bird Life of Australia, a combined autobiographical work and oological catalogue, illustrated with his own photographs, which was published in 1907.

In 1906 Jackson had sold his collection of nearly 2000 eggs, representing over 500 species of Australian birds, to H.L. White, a wealthy pastoralist based at Scone, New South Wales who was a keen amateur ornithologist and oologist. In 1907 White then employed Jackson as curator of his collection of eggs and bird skins, as well as a collector of further specimens. During this period Jackson travelled extensively throughout Australia on quests to obtain specimens and eggs of various birds. Following White’s death in 1927, Jackson moved to Sydney where he wrote popular illustrated articles on natural history for newspapers and magazines, mainly the Sydney Morning Herald and the World's News, using the pen name ‘Ajax’.

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