From his earliest age, Kitson took an interest in the natural world around him. Throughout his career he collected fossils which he would send to museums in Victoria and London. He was fascinated by the Victorian Lyrebird, publishing an article on it for the Smithsonian Institution. In the Australian bush he learnt a facility to handle snakes and this would later earn him a reputation on the Gold Coast as a fetish priest. He was also a keen photographer. By the end of his first three years in the Gold Coast he had taken around 450 photos of the colony. Many of these are preserved in Ghana's national archive (where they are wrongly attributed to E. A. Kitson). Kitson was also noted for his keen amateur interest in archeology, finding numerous artefacts which he made available to Museums in Africa and England.