Out in the Open - A Budget of Scraps of Natural History Gathered in New Zealand

Capper Press, 1976.

Thomas Henry Potts, one of New Zealand's earliest conservationists, was born in London, England, on 23 November 1824, the son of Thomas Potts, a gun maker, and his wife, Mary Ann Freeman. He was baptised at Brandon, Suffolk, but it is unclear where he spent his childhood.

Potts became a noted student of New Zealand's bird life; unlike Walter Buller, he neither sought nor received glory, although he was the better bird-watcher and naturalist. His four papers in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute (1869?73) gave the fullest descriptions of New Zealand's bird life then available; they were quickly overshadowed by Buller's major work of 1873, for which Potts had contributed field notes. He wrote almost 100 articles (some under the pen-name 'Rambler'); the best were published in the New Zealand Country Journal from 1878 to 1888. His book Out in the open collected the series as far as 1882, and was the first substantial work of natural history published locally...