Edward Blyth was an English zoologist who worked for most of his life in India as a curator of zoology at the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. He catalogued the specimens in the collection in his Catalogue of the Birds of the Asiatic Society in 1849. He did not collect specimens himself but received and described bird specimens from A.O. Hume, Samuel Tickell, Robert Swinhoe among others. His Natural History of the Cranes was published posthumously in 1881.