"Nest of Acrulocephalus familiaris..." from The Avifauna of Laysan and the Neighboring Islands: with a...

In 1890, when Lionel Rothschild was only 23, he sent a sailor named Henry Palmer to the Sandwich Islands (the name given to the Hawaiian Islands by Captain James Cook in the late 1770s) and most particularly to Laysan, one of the Leeward Islands in the Hawaiian archipelago, which is now part of the Hawaiian Islands Bird Reservation. His instructions were to collect as many different birds as possible, with special attention to inter-island variation. Palmer spent over two years at the task and sent almost 2000 specimens back to Rothschild, including representatives of 15 species previously unknown to Western science and several species which have since become extinct.