Thomas William Evans of Cheshire was a sailor by trade, but his happiest hours were spent in search of waterfowl on the estuary of the River Dee. A great hunter and “puntsman,” he also — like so many British “working-man naturalists” — made himself invaluable to the ornithologists of the day, in his case providing specimens and dates for Coward and Oldham’s Vertebrate Fauna of Cheshire and Liverpool Bay.
Evans died 100 years ago today, having signed on three weeks earlier as helmsman and quartermaster of the Lusitania.
