prepared the first comprehensive list of Ireland's birds for the 1840 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Glasgow. Other work, primarily about birds, was published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London and the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Journal. These papers formed the basis of his seminal work—The Natural History of Ireland—published in four volumes between 1849 and 1851. Birds Thompson either owned or had access to a very comprehensive ornithological library exemplared by the Ornithological Dictionary, Le Règne Animal, Selby's Illustrations of British Ornithology, Coenraad Jacob Temminck's Manuel d'ornithologie ou Tableau systématique des oiseaux qui se trouvent en Europe (Sepps & Dufour, Amsterdam, Paris 1815–40), William Edward Parry, 1821 Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Performed in the years 1819–'20, in His Majecty's Ships Hecla and Griper ... with an Appendix Containing the Scientific and Other Observations London (1821), William John Swainson and John Richardson, 1831. Fauna boreali-Americana: part second, the birds, Charles Lucien Bonaparte's Synopsis of the Birds of the United States, Peter Simon Pallas' Zoographia Russo-Asiatica. His other tool was his own and other private bird collections and those of the museums in Belfast and Dublin. The major bird publications are the 1841 Report on the fauna of Ireland (Vertebrata) for the British Association for the Advancement of Science which is an early biogeographic work contrasting the vertebrates of Britain and Ireland. Thompson notes that with a few exceptions the native birds of Britain as then accepted by Jardine and Selby are all found in Ireland. and The Natural History of Ireland is, in the section on birds, a Monograph with a literary style, sometimes anecdotal giving information on anatomy, plumage, behaviour, nesting and breeding, seasonality and distribution. Thompson documented many rare in Ireland bird species, variously collected by his network of correspondents. Among birds these included the first Irish occurrences of Bonaparte's Gull and American Bittern.He was a sceptical observer writing on the Red Kite 'The name of "Kite" appears commonly in the catalogues of birds given in the Statistical Surveys of the Irish counties, and elsewhere; but, as the larger species of the falconidae are in some places called Kite and Glead, as well as Goshawk or Goose-hawk, there can be no doubt that the buzzard, or some common species, was meant. Marine biology In 1834 Thompson