Lord William Percy

Colonel Lord William Richard Percy (17 May 1882 – 8 February 1963) was a British military officer, barrister, and aristocrat from the Percy family who served in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War. He was also an ornithologist who was an authority on the bittern.

Biography Lord William was born at 25 Grosvenor Square, the fourth son of Henry Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland and Lady Edith Campbell, daughter of George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll. After his eldest brother, Henry, Earl Percy, died in 1909 of pneumonia, his brother Alan became heir to the dukedom. His youngest brother was Eustace Percy, 1st Baron Percy of Newcastle.

Percy attended the University of Oxford where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club. In 1906, he was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple but left the law over his "disgust" with a judge's handling of a murder case.

Travel and ornithology

Lord Percy was a lifelong traveler who made many expeditions to Africa, the Middle East, to the Americas, and to Siberia. He wrote a few articles in scientific journals and published a short book on Norfolk waterfowl, Three Studies in Bird Character: Bitterns, Herons and Water Rails, published in 1951. He also contributed essays to David Armitage Bannerman's Birds of the British Isles. One of these was an account of Steller's eider duck, "the most fascinating of all ducks in the Old World or the New", based upon observations made during an expedition to North East Siberia which he had undertaken to find another duck, the spectacled eider, which at the time was mistakenly believed to be extinct.