Nathaniel Charles Rothschild (1877 – 1923) was an English banker and entomologist and a member of the Rothschild family. He is remembered for "The Rothschild List", a list he made in 1915 of 284 sites across Britain that he considered suitable for nature reserves.

Charles devoted much of his energies to entomology and natural history collecting. His enormous collection of some 260,000 fleas is now in the "Rothschild Collection" at the Natural History Museum where he described about 500 new flea species.

One of these, which he discovered and named, was the plague vector flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, also known as the oriental rat flea, which he collected at Shendi, Sudan, on an expedition in 1901, publishing his finding in 1903.

Today Rothschild is regarded as a pioneer of nature conservation in Britain, and is credited with establishing the UK's first nature reserve when he bought Wicken Fen, near Ely, in 1899.

Wicken Fen was presented to the National Trust but the Trust declined to take Woodwalton Fen, near Huntingdon, which Rothschild bought in 1910, and this wetland, now a National Nature Reserve, was kept as a private nature reserve.

During his lifetime he built and managed his estate at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire to maximise its suitability for wildlife, especially butterflies. He was concerned about the loss of wildlife habitats, and in 1912 set up the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, the forerunner of The Wildlife Trusts partnership.

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