Samuel Tickell

Colonel Samuel Richard Tickell (19 August 1811 – 20 April 1875) was an English soldier, artist, linguist and ornithologist in India and Burma.

Biography Tickell was born at Cuttack in India to Captain Samuel Tickell (of the 8th regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry) and Mary née Morris. His grandfather was Richard Tickell the English playwright and satirist. Lieutenant General Richard Tickell was a first cousin once removed.

Samuel Tickell was educated in England with a training at Addiscombe from 1827 to 1829, returning at age nineteen to join the Bengal Native Infantry in 1829. He served in the 31st Bengal Native Infantry during the Kol campaign (1832–33). He was made commander of Brian Hodgson's military escort to Kathmandu from 1834. He returned to Bengal in 1843, and after his promotion to captain in 1847 he was moved to Arakan, lower Burma.

During his time in India, Tickell made important contributions to the country's ornithology and mammalogy, with field observations and the collections of specimens. He contributed to volume 17 of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Volume 18 included a report by Tickell from Burma. He wrote under the pen-name of "Ornithognomon" and "Old Log". Hume noted that many of the notes written as "Ornithognomon" in the Field were based on observations of another amateur ornithologist, Frederic Wilson. Tickell married Maria Georgiana, daughter of J.W. Templer at Bankura on 11 July 1844. The work showcased his excellent artistic abilities, including paintings of birds in natural habitats as well as ink vignettes showing scenes from Indian life.

A number of birds were named after Tickell, including:

Tickell's flowerpecker, Dicaeum erythrorhynchos Tickell's leaf warbler, Phylloscopus affinis Tickell's thrush, Turdus unicolor Tickell's brown hornbill, Anorrhinus tickelli;

and possibly one species after his wife, given the feminine or plural form (i.e. honouring the Tickell couple), though this isn't made clear in the original description: Tickell's blue flycatcher, Cyornis tickelliae.

Tickell was also interested in linguistics and wrote a series of articles on the grammatical structure of the Ho language.