William Henry Hudson (4 August 1841 - 18 August 1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist.
Hudson was born in Quilmes, near Buenos Aires, Argentina.[a] He was the son of Daniel Hudson and his wife Catherine née Kemble, United States settlers of English and Irish origin. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, initially in an English mingled with Spanish idioms. He had a special love of Patagonia.
He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888-1899) and British Birds (1895), and later achieved fame with his books on the English countryside, including Hampshire Days (1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s and was set in Wiltshire.
Hudson's best-known novel is Green Mansions (1904), and his best-known non-fiction is Far Away and Long Ago (1918), which was made into a film.