Home > Bertram E. Smythies

Smythies was born in India, to E.A. Smythies, silviculturalist of Uttar Pradesh and in the 1940s, Chief Conservator of Forest of Nepal, and his wife, Olive, well-known author of The Tiger Lady. After school at "home" in U.K., Bill read botany and forestry at Balliol College, Oxford.

He joined the Colonial Forest Service and took up duties with the Burma Forest Service from 1934 to 1948. Here, as a keen amateur ornithologist, in 1940 he was drawn into the task of writing the text for Birds of Burma.