British ornithologist. Herbert Stevens, of Tring, travelled with an American expedition at the end of 1928 to China, where he collected a number of plants. The Kelley-Roosevelt Asiatic Expedition's key members, Col. Theodore Roosevelt, Major Kermit Roosevelt and C. Sudam Cutting, were to track down the Giant Panda as their main objective. Meanwhile three naturalists (including Frank Kingdon-Ward) took part in the expedition under the leadership of Harold J. Coolidge.

Herbert Stevens worked intensively in western China, accompanying the Roosevelts up the Irawaddy as far as the Chinese-Burmese border. He continued from January 1929 northward from Tengyueh with a separate caravan, spending the whole of February collecting in the Lichiang bend. He then moved north into Sichuan and spent May in the Wushi hills south of Kangding (then called Tatsienlu). He worked around Kangding for some time before descending the Yangtze to Shanghai. Chicago's Field Museum received 2,400 specimens from this expedition. Stevens also gathered 500 mammal specimens, 1,000 birds and 5,000 butterflies.

Stevens participated in a number of other natural history expeditions, including the Sladen-Godman Expedition to Tonkin of 1925. Other than in China, however, he only collected plants in Papua New Guinea in the 1930s. He had previously lived at Darjeeling, India.

Sources:
E.H.M. Cox, 1945, Plant Hunting in China: 190-191.