Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen CBE DSO was a British soldier, intelligence officer and ornithologist known for his collections from Africa and the Middle East.

Meinertzhagen was born into a wealthy family, his father being at the head of a merchant banking firm. After schooling in Sussex and Harrow, he joined the family business as a clerk and was assigned to offices in Germany in 1895. Returning to England two years later, he spent his spare time training with the Territorial Army and pursuing an interest in ornithology.

Military training became Meinertzhagen's overriding interest and he left the bank for the British Army. In 1899 he left for India with a battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, and was transferred to British East Africa in 1902 as a staff officer in the King's African Rifles. During his time in India and Africa he participated in big game hunting and natural history exploration, leading to his delegation in 1903 to conduct a survey of wild animals in the Serengeti and Athi plains. His reputation as a natural history collector grew when he shipped to London the first specimen of a Giant African Forest Hog in 1903. He also gathered some botanical collections.

Meinertzhagen's relations with the local tribes were not good, however and his violent conduct eventually led to his expulsion from this posting in 1906. After a period in the War Office he was able to return to Africa, this time serving in Cape Town and Mauritius (1907-1909), and then in India again from 1913. He served in both India and East Africa during the First World War, as an intelligence officer, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1916, in which year he was invalided home. He spent part of 1917 in Sinai and Palestine, where he collected plants in his spare time.

While posted to France in 1918, he again took the opportunity to collect plants, meanwhile being involved in momentous events such as the Paris Peace Conference and the forming of the Palestine Mandate. He retired from the army in 1925 with the rank of Major and reinstated Lieutenant Colonel in 1939.

Following his retirement, Meinertzhagen devoted himself to ornithology, in particular collecting bird lice. He completed and edited Nicoll's Birds of Egypt in 1930 and mounted a collecting expedition to the Middle East, North Africa and South Africa in 1948-1949. His best known work was Birds of Arabia (1954). His reputation was later brought into disrepute, however, when analysis of his collections showed he had claimed credit for collecting specimens that were in fact collected by others, or indeed that he had stolen from the Natural History Museum in London.

Sources:
P.H. Capstick, 1998, Warrior: The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen
B. Garfield, 2007, The Meinertzhagen Mystery
A.G. Knox, 1993, "Richard Meinertzhagen - a case of fraud examined", Ibis, 135(3): 320-325.