Oliver Vernon Aplin was born in 1858. He lived all his life in Oxfordshire and had a keen interest in the natural history of the area. He published a number of papers and notes on British birds, particularly those of Oxfordshire, Norfolk and the Lleyn Penninsula, North Wales, including regular contributions to The Zoologist. In 1882 he published A List of the Birds of the Banbury District with his two brothers, F.C. Aplin and Rev. B. D'O. Aplin but he is probably best known as the author of Birds of Oxfordshire, published in 1889. He was elected a member of the British Ornithological Union in 1888. He made a number of trips abroad during the 1890s, visiting Switzerland with William Warde Fowler in 1891, and collecting in Uruguay (1892), Eastern Algeria (1895) and Northern Norway (1896). He married Mary David Hyde in 1895, and died in 1940.

Obituaries of Aplin were published in the journals British Birds, vol. 34, no. 11, pp. 242–243, and Ibis, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 186–189.