The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan

By Briony Penn

The Real Thing is the first official biography of Ian McTaggart Cowan (1910–2010), the “father of Canadian ecology.” Authorized by his family and with the research support and participation of the University of Victoria Libraries, Briony Penn provides an unprecedented and accessible window into the story of this remarkable naturalist. From his formative years roaming the mountains around Vancouver looking for venison to his last years finishing the voluminous and authoritative Birds of British Columbia, Cowan’s life provides a unique perspective on a century of environmental change—with a critical message for the future.

As the head and founder of the first university-based wildlife department in Canada, Ian McTaggart Cowan revolutionized the way North Americans understood the natural world, and students flocked into his classrooms to hear his brilliant, entertaining lectures regarding the new science of ecology. His television programs in the 1950s and ’60s, Fur and Feathers, The Web of Life and The Living Sea, made him a household name around the world. He was also responsible for hiring a young David Suzuki, who followed in his nature-show-host footsteps.

Illustrated throughout with colour and black-and-white photos from all aspects of Cowan’s life, The Real Thing takes the reader on an adventurous and inspirational journey through the heart of North American ecology, wilderness, landscape and wonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RMB Rocky Mountain Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771600712

Briony Penn

Briony Penn has spent the last twenty-two years working as an award-winning newspaper and magazine columnist/illustrator, having published over 400 columns on natural/cultural history in regional newspapers and magazines, including “Wild Side” for Monday Magazine and “Natural Relations” for Focus. She received a Western Magazine Award for Best Columnist and Feature Writer, won the Silver Environment Educator Award at the Canadian Environmental Awards and was nominated for best North American columnist in alternative weeklies. She lives on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

Book preview

The Real Thing

The Natural History

of Ian McTaggart Cowan

by Briony Penn

CONTENTS

Preface

Part 1

The Early Years: 1910–1920

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Part 2

The Formative Years: 1927–1929

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part 3

Gathering Skills: 1929–1932

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part 4

The Berkeley Years: 1932–1935

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part 5

The Museum Years: 1935–1940

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part 6

The Early University Years: 1941–1950

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Part 7

Travel, Television and Advocacy: 1952–2010

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Table of Species

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Photo Section

Map

PREFACE

All my life I have tried to explain to colleagues, family, students – anyone who will listen to me – the beautiful, fascinating things that I see! It is not all sweetness and light but this world is absolutely fascinating.1

In the opening pages of his 1956 handbook The Mammals of British Columbia, Ian McTaggart Cowan encouraged us, his readers, to join him in unraveling the innermost secrets of the lives of mammals.2 This book is a continuing invitation to reveal the innermost secrets not only of the lives of animals but of the man himself and the lives of his gentle, paradoxical and radical cohort of naturalists who influenced British Columbia in more ways than I ever imagined before starting this project.

Ian McTaggart Cowan first came into my life, as he did for many of us, through this small, pocket-companion guide. The handbook series put out by the BC Provincial Museum half a century ago (some of which are now updated through the Royal BC Museum), which Cowan was to have such an important hand in, explained in encouraging language the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, shells, ferns and more. Species by species, we all learned the names of our fellow British Columbians and became members of a fascinating community. On the cover of the handbooks were the names that became as familiar as the large, charismatic mammals featured within: Ian McTaggart Cowan, Charlie Guiguet, Clifford Carl and many more. It was hard to imagine that something as innocuous as a field guide or handbook could be perceived by some as such a dangerous political weapon.

Ian McTaggart Cowan would have been only halfway through his life when I first came under his enthusiastic spell, but by then that influence had already spread around the province like mycelia – the fine roots of underground fungi that feed the forest and the next generation – and I was one of its many beneficiaries. As a budding naturalist growing up in Victoria, I was introduced to the subversive Vancouver Island Rock and Alpine Garden Society by a horticulturalist, Mr. Raven. Under his instruction we made magical native moss gardens for the annual show, cultivating wild Shooting Stars and Easter Lilies. For my school field trips, park naturalist Freeman (Skipper) King, who loomed like the giant Western Redcedar at Goldstream Provincial Park, explained the spectacle of a salmon spawn. First Bristol Foster, then Yorke Edwards, headed up the sparkling new provincial museum that overshadowed even the provincial legislature. They reassured a generation of us that where we lived was exciting, beautiful and important, inhabited by a diverse showcase of creatures and cultures. All of these men had been supported in their pursuits either directly or indirectly through institutions touched by Cowan. These vibrant people appeared everywhere: on the trails in the Rocky Mountains, in the intertidal zone at Long Beach, up in the grasslands above Kamloops and on university field trips at UBC. If there was no one around, I always had the pocket companions from the provincial museum to guide me.

These naturalists used a language that was reassuring for a child. They were interested in small things, in the natural world, in sharing their knowledge, and they cared enough to speak out to protect that world. These were the broad shoulders upon which many of us cobbled our careers and vocations, and Ian McTaggart Cowan’s name was ever present. In the course of those years, I got interested in the culture of these naturalists and started to collect their stories on the side. They came from all ecological niches: the expected – biologists, native elders, environmental educators, raging grannies; but also the unexpected – nuns, cowboys, hunters, trappers and shopkeepers. Most were regular Canadians. Some were prominent scientist–activists such as Bristol Foster, Yorke Edwards and David Suzuki; political leaders with strong environmental interests like David Anderson and Elizabeth May; and activists and artists on the edge like Paul Watson, Roy Henry Vickers, Colleen and Wayne McCrory and Robert Bateman. All of them had a connection back to Ian McTaggart Cowan.

In 1999 I decided to try to put the stories of this group together in a book proposal with the working title Beautiful British Columbians. The criteria for inclusion were a love of the province, a will to defend the landscape and a desire to share their knowledge. A Canada Council grant bought me a couple of months to come up with a list, do some longer interviews and tie down this idea that had been burrowing away in my brain like Cowan’s famous moles of the Fraser Delta.

Book publishers posed the question why anyone should care about these naturalists. I have had time to hone my response, the first ending in a rejected book proposal. First of all, these scientists were funny and curious – almost radical qualities these days. These were people that hadn’t adopted the prevailing pioneer mentality to go out and conquer the landscape. They liked what was already here, and that included the indigenous cultures and the wildlife. Their story might throw some light on how to encourage this. It is an important question of the 21st century. It may be the only question our grandchildren will thank us for trying to answer.

I also knew people were feeling despair at the state of the world and would want to hear how others coped. It was heartbreaking being an environmental journalist documenting the changes. Surely there were many of us watching the constant destruction and suffering – looking for hope, given that extinctions have a certain finality about them. Only mythological phoenix species ever rise from ashes. I was interested in a question that deserves the best minds we can find to answer it: What would be a useful thing to do, given the extraordinary challenges we face today? While conducting interviews in 2000, I was told repeatedly, You have to talk to Dr. Cowan. After nearly a century of witnessing and contemplating these issues, he had an influence that was legendary. In the parlance of the biologist, he was the alpha male. He was a keystone species unto himself, upon which an entire ecosystem relied. It was time to interview this man.

Ian McTaggart Cowan had been described to me as the father of wildlife conservation and ecology and one of the world’s leading mammalogists and ornithologists. Others mentioned his expertise in rodents, molluscs, ungulates, alpine flowers and revenue stamps. More accolades: the ultimate Renaissance man and Canada’s pioneer of natural history television programming (his shows were being broadcast around the world before I was even born). He was an academic who had received more distinctions (including Officer of the Order of Canada and Order of British Columbia) than any other Canadian scientist. He was the namesake of two professorships and three scholarships, and a trusted mentor for at least three generations of students, colleagues, activists and policy-makers.

When I first contacted him, in 2000, he was 90 years old. I was a half century behind him. A rather rigorous exchange of emails ensued, during which, I gather, he was testing my resolve. He was interested in the type of questions I would be asking and how I would use the material. He was in the middle of co-writing the last volume of what would be his final collaborative venture, the magnum opus that is Birds of BC. His wife, Joyce, wasn’t well, and (as he later told me) he only had so much energy to give in a day. He felt it was essential that there be an educational purpose to my book. I obviously passed the test and was invited to come over.

The Victoria city bus left me at a sandy beach in Cadboro Bay, which offered up a flock of American Wigeon and a River Otter family. I followed a Nootka rose and snowberry trail up towards Sea View Road, which led to the dappled shade of Woodhaven Terrace – I was arriving at some kind of fabled destination. Hidden from view behind large Douglas-firs and an array of alpine species, his house was an unassuming bungalow buzzing with hummingbirds and chickadees. I had arrived at the door of a Canadian legend.

I was nervous when I knocked; legends are either terrifying or disappointing. A tall, lean, handsome man, attired as though for the trail or garden, swung the door open with a flourish and gave me a warm welcome. He insisted I call him Ian. It was easy to imagine why he had been one of UBC’s most popular professors ever – students crowding his lecture theatre until the fire department had to come. A Columbian Black-tailed Deer buck, with some exceptionally fine antlers, the subject of his PhD dissertation at Berkeley in 1935, had just crossed in front of me seconds earlier as I arrived in the garden. Ian’s love of deer both alive and in his freezer was also legendary. We watched it saunter off to the next-door garden before he ushered me in.

We entered his study packed with books and wildlife paraphernalia: shells, skulls, casts of tracks, horns, duck decoys, sculptures and paintings. A desk and computer, with statistical software currently in use, marked the inner den of Ian McTaggart Cowan. He invited me to browse the shelves: a row of early children’s books by authors like Ernest Thompson Seton; an entire bookshelf of his own publications, both academic and popular, including the original editions of Mammals of BC and Birds of BC; his cloth-bound field journals taking up at least two rows; a shelf of publications by his graduate students, numbering more than a hundred; a row of wildlife guides from around the world; and an entire wall of academic journals. In every patch of spare space hung his own exquisite black and white photographs: Mountain Goats on rocky crags; Great Horned Owls mantling prey; Pikas, or rock rabbits, next to a famous portrait of his friend and mentor Jimmy Simpson at a mountain camp – each individual comfortable in their habitat. Photos of his family – Joyce; their children, Garry and Ann; their grandchildren; their first great-grandchild – alternated with paintings of birds by Fenwick Lansdowne, Frank Beebe, Allan Brooks, Roy Henry Vickers and Glen Smith – renowned wildlife artists who were also friends, mentors or students.

Awards lay everywhere, dozens of them, propping up the books, acting as doorstops. I picked up randomly a bronze Haida carving of an orca for his contributions to the international conservation of marine mammals; a stone humpback fluke for his contributions to the Society of Conservation Biologists; a plaque from the BC Field Ornithologists for contributions to the study of birds; a carved wooden bowl presented by the Lieutenant-Governor of BC for his pioneering work on parks; a whooping crane for being named International Conservationist of the Year by the US National Wildlife Federation; a chunk of Precambrian rock for service as a fellow of the Arctic Institute of Canada; a gold certificate from the Alpine Garden Club of BC for his alpine azaleas; and a gold medal for his collection of Yukon revenue stamps. After tea with Joyce, Ian’s wife of over 60 years, we wandered round the rock garden, where his greatest enthusiasm of the day was reserved for the tiny alpine Scilla that had just won another prize. We sat down and negotiated the terms of the interviews: we would start with three half-days staggered over a month, and the notes would be for educational use only.

It was clear that the timeline provided was one of Ian’s little jokes. After the first round of interviews, we hadn’t gotten much beyond 1926. He was in a category of his own – a global category, not just among the beautiful British Columbians. Unbeknownst to me, the groundwork for a much larger work was being laid. The time required was not just in trying to record a century of a life packed full, but also due to the man’s phenomenal ability to accurately recall places, names and details. He could recount, for example, the size of a Bighorn Sheep herd on a particular day on a particular mountain slope fifty years earlier. When I discussed my own research project into Sandhill Cranes on the Central Coast, he recalled instantly that he had seen nesting cranes in the back lagoon of Spider Island in the spring of 1939.

Our conversations leapt seamlessly from his biography to zoology and from anecdote to science. Sporadically over the next five years, I ended up with about 20 hours of interviews, on both audio- and videotapes, completed with the help of his close friends and students Bristol Foster, Val Geist and Rod Silver, as well as Bob Weeden, Don Eastman and Peter Ommundsen.3 I didn’t yet know at that stage that I was going to write his biography (oh, the questions I would ask now!). My last interview with Ian was in 2005 – three years after his stroke and Joyce’s death, both of which had diminished but not extinguished his incredible enthusiasm for all forms of life.

In these interviews I got a privileged glimpse into his century – and what a century. In mathematical terms, the population-savvy Cowan would have noted that 1910 to 2010 represents one of the steepest trajectories in rates of extinction the world has ever experienced, rivalling the late Cretaceous. In his lifetime the number of humans had escalated from 1.75 billion to just under 7 billion, consuming proportionally more resources than in the past ten millennia to achieve a rising standard of living but also an obscene inequity. In poetic terms, Cowan the photographer and writer had captured the beauty and diversity of the wildlife and landscapes devoured. The loss of them was profound. What captured my imagination was that he was both early witness to and participant in these changes. He was the last of the naturalist–hunters and the first of the alarmed scientists. He also had the experience of an immigrant Canadian in search of that rising standard of living – having left a ravaged European country with its forests and native wildlife long decimated to come to one of the richest places in North America. He could be as hungry as anyone for wild game, a load of wood to build his house and a trip on a plane to Baja. He could also articulate the impacts of development and express his gratefulness to the activist who could point out the destruction and the tragicomic irony of our lives. As an educator of some three generations of students, he had observed first-hand the downward slide of knowledge about and connection to the natural world, and he worried about the children who had no relations with nature.

It was his empathy for the forces at work in the world that most intrigued me. The son of a market gardener, he supplemented the family protein, as many Canadians of that era did, through good marksmanship. It was a skill that served him well in his career as wildlife biologist and museum curator, when shooting specimens and handling skins were part of the job. Having experienced poverty, he had an appreciation for the people who subsisted on wildlife, whether native trapper or local hunter. It was this very crossing of boundaries that caught the respect of most who met him. Cowan, during my generation, had skirted the factionalism and politics of environmentalism in a way that few have since. He was as well respected by female urban activists as by male rural hunters.

One of the lectures he delivered in the mid-1970s was called A Whimsical and Slightly Irreverent Look at Environment in Canada. In typical style, Cowan had carefully observed, catalogued and mapped out this colourful community in which he lived and worked, the varied fauna of vertebrates exhibiting some of the strangest behaviour patterns I have detected in a lifetime of research. He characterized the various groups who lobbied for the environment as being different species of crows that inhabited rough country featuring many isolated hills. Their raucous calls were so varied and unique to each peak that it inhibited effective genetic exchange. Observing that some feed off others while others forge links that cross disciplines and support one another, he concluded that relationships with the other biota range from symbiotic to parasitic. Their greatest predator was Gymnogyps rapinus, or the Corporate Buzzard, "a continent-wide, resource-hungry raptor that is semi-solitary and territorial, with a sex-ratio highly biased to males; with a high rate of consumption but low energetic efficiency, leading to an abnormally high defecation rate. Areas of activity, therefore, are marked by high accumulations of waste products. Then there was Canis parliamentarius, "frequently harried by crows and courted by Gymnogyps."

In these lecture notes, which looked much like his guides to fauna, lies the essence of Cowan the scientific observer and educator. The man who had studied the ecosystem of Canadian society, and his own niche in it – which he told me was to make whatever contribution he could best make at the time. Fortified by his societal distinctions, bolstered with his voluminous research and clad in his camouflage garb of museum curator, professor, chair of committees, dean or chancellor, Cowan was able to express his passions and legitimize the protection of the natural world in a way that few other advocates for nature can. His contributions helped build a supportive ecosystem in which my generation flourished. He had helped put in place the curriculum, teachers, books, museums, programs, parks, jobs and cultural milieu that enabled a Super, Natural BC culture to thrive.

Cowan at age 90 was still very much on top of his game and had allocated some of his diminishing energy to sharing his stories with an activist–journalist quite raucous in tone. I produced several articles and a short television episode on his life but couldn’t find a publisher for my original book idea. At the time, Ian had said he’d like to write his autobiography after the completion of Birds of BC. His intention: I want to document what we are losing, with this book. But that wasn’t to be. Meanwhile, two projects emerged that involved colleagues and students (he had over 100 grad students alone). The first was a book that began as a collection of 100 memories of Cowan, to coincide with his 100th birthday;4 and a tribute article documenting the more than 300 papers and books he produced over his lifetime.5 Neither publication, however, was primarily focused on documenting the losses.

After Ian Cowan died in 2010, just before his 100th birthday, his surviving daughter, Ann Schau, and student–colleague Rod Silver began a conversation about a biography of sorts based on the collection of his field journals, photographs, correspondence, lecture materials and interviews. In true Cowan fashion, his instructions were that they could only be used for public educational purposes. In 2012 I was brought into the project, and we spent the next ten months assessing and cataloguing the collection with the assistance of archivist Walter Meyer zu Erpen and the many who are named in the acknowledgements. We worked our way through filing cabinets and boxes of material, digitizing the most relevant. It was obvious that these were journals and correspondence saved precisely for the public’s eyes. We didn’t have to look far for evidence of this. Cowan had pasted his intentions right in the back of an early field journal from 1933. It was the instructions of Joseph Grinnell, his much-admired academic supervisor at Berkeley, to his students:

Ascertain everything possible in regard to the natural history of the vertebrate life of the regions traversed and to make careful record of the facts gathered in the form of specimens and notes, to be preserved for all time. All this is for the information of others; strive to make your record in all respects clearly intelligible. Remember that the value of our manuscripts increases as the years go by and faunal changes take place. Some of our earlier notebooks describe conditions now vanished in the localities they dealt with.

— J. Grinnell, September 12, 1933

In many cases, the fauna of the localities Cowan worked in have indeed vanished and the journals are poignant reminders of what we have destroyed. The field notes for the Okanagan grasslands describe the quiet diggings of badgers under a full moon amongst the Antelope Brush, much of which now lies under strip malls and vineyards. The journals describing the Ootsa, the Kootenay and the Peace River valleys are ghost landscapes. Much now lies underwater. Field notes from the Mackenzie Delta or the forests of Vancouver Island tell us what was there before dams, highways, pipelines, logging and mining carved up the landscape. The journal of the fauna of Point Grey or Richmond points to a Vancouver that is almost unrecognizable. The journals also give us some sense of what could be restored should we have the inclination. In some cases, like the islands off the central coast, we have a benchmark that hasn’t changed so drastically, accentuating the importance of these last intact ecosystems, allowing us to celebrate the restoration of populations like the Humpback Whales. Revisiting these landscapes today as part of my research formed a vital part of telling this story.

According to Cowan, the simple explanation of landscape and wildlife doesn’t make a story sufficiently engaging for readers. He developed his own art of storytelling – at which he was a master – through simple observation of his students:

Most textbooks start with a discussion of anatomy, then start with protozoa and work up to mammals. That is not what students are interested in. I started talking about humans … Then you can start telling them about the other categories of creatures, because you have them."6

My favourite example of his technique is his opening for a 1961 Vancouver Institute lecture on population ecology, Of Mice and Men, where his first reference to scientific data starts: I have a friend who decided to breed a pair of mice and see how many there would be after a year. In the background of that early reel- to-reel recording, you hear the audience laugh and audibly relax into a good evening of entertainment and education as the revered dean takes the audience from his friend’s mice-infested basement to the marvels of evolution through his example of mouse speciation on the islands of BC’s coast and then to the thornier and more difficult territory of human consumption and overpopulation. In writing this biography, I’ve attempted to emulate Cowan’s technique and use stories from his long life to springboard into the behaviour of unusual animals or the peculiarities of places. In the process, there is always that didactic moment to throw in the mechanisms of evolution or the tools of conservation.

Because Cowan had seen more flora and fauna around British Columbia than virtually any human being could have before or will again, his stock of stories was almost inexhaustible. He also witnessed the impacts of overhunting, pollution, pesticides, logging, dam construction, oil and gas development and climate change that pointed to an increasingly impoverished future. Not surprisingly, he was always one of the first – if not the first – to raise the alarm. As Canadians we haven’t done a very good job of crediting our scientists as leaders, prophets or innovators of ideas. As one of my interviewees noted, if Cowan had been born in the United States, he would have been a household name.

That isn’t to say his accomplishments have gone unnoticed. Ten months of assembling his folio of papers gives us just a glimpse of the outward accomplishments of the man. They are so extensive that few can wade through his progression of honours without getting a little weary and casting about for some peccadillo or personal skeleton in a closet. There are indeed lots of skeletons, an entire museum (or two or three), such as the Cowan Tetrapod Collection in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC. That is the most interesting paradox for modern eyes – Cowan’s intense love of hunting, coupled with an equally intense desire to see wildlife survive. The scale of his hunting animals as a young man is matched only by the scale of his saving animals as a middle-aged administrator. It is no wonder he felt protective of the predators, being one himself. This biography teases out the intertwined and paradoxical relationship between the two activities.

Other than some youthful blood lust, there was little to dislike in Cowan, and for a biographer that is always a problem. Writing about Ian McTaggart Cowan can border on hagiography at times. I looked hard for some kind of tragic flaw. He may have had an overly fond regard for regalia and was very competitive, but so are many male pheasants. We love them for it. He liked his group of male friends, but so do Mule Deer. This might have suggested a fatal streak of chauvinism in Cowan, but on closer inspection of his papers and of interviews with his oldest colleagues and students, I found little evidence of such. Instead, a much more fascinating and complex picture emerged. Cowan’s early invitation to unravel the innermost secrets of the lives of mammals was what I found myself doing in perusing his own life.

The most revealing find in this large collection was a slim file enigmatically called the ‘B.’ It was there that we discover the broader historical context for Cowan’s life path: a secret, underground network of scientists and naturalists that threaded the continent like root filaments. This society was a veritable who’s who of ecology that included such well-known names as Aldo Leopold, and it embodied a centuries-long history of determined struggle against political forces intent on discrediting voices like theirs that spoke up for the sanctity of the wild.

This biography starts with Ian McTaggart Cowan’s origins and follows his early years from 1926 to 1961 as captured in his field journals. The story is told largely in his own words, drawn from those journals and from correspondence, articles and books. Some of his earliest students, who spent time with him in the field, have filled in the gaps. They are themselves Beautiful British Columbians. Interspersed are the descriptions of species as Cowan encountered them in the field – using selected excerpts from his various field guides (tabled alphabetically at p.465). The excerpts serve two purposes: they educate the reader in a little natural history (which Cowan insisted on); and they hint at what was going on in his life, from courtship to flourishing career to dying, through metaphor (which he did not suggest).

The observations of Cowan in his habitat by friends, students and family, and the evidence from his biographies of species, were mostly all I had to go on, since he kept very few personal letters. The reader can use inference and metaphor drawn from the lives of Northern Flying Squirrels, Black-tailed Deer or Red-legged Frogs for the innermost life of Cowan. I don’t think he would have disapproved. In truth, his accounts of a young Mountain Goat’s first steps or the breeding habits of the Northern Flying Squirrel are some of the most compelling expressions of parenthood and love that I have read. Cowan had many personal sorrows, but he pragmatically slotted them into the natural cycles of birth, growth, death and decay.

This is a book that essentially wrote itself, with a natural synchronicity. Invariably I’d wonder about some aspect in Cowan’s life and he’d mention an animal in a journal whose description provided a clue to his own life. Sometimes that same animal would suddenly turn up outside my window and I would be reminded of Cowan’s observation that when you pay attention to your own landscape, a rich life pervades.

When he considered my interview question about coping with despair, he initially responded with a question in return: I would ask, Is [despair] that useful? This was quintessential Cowan. Within his story lies the secret to how he stayed buoyant through a century of change. The answer is to follow him into the mountains and through the arid grasslands, sail with him over the seas, sleep under the stars, stalk prey, cook it over an open fire and eat it in the company of good friends, revelling in the freedom, the beauty and the space that humans everywhere once experienced as the seasons cycled through and that Cowan wished for everyone to experience. He had good teachers and you will meet them in this book. They have fur and feathers, scales and skin. All of them I found fascinating and they have reinforced what I had suspected as a child, that nature has an exceptional ability to produce the real thing.

Reader’s notes

The book uses standard conventions for the scientific names and the English, or common, names of animals. All species’ Common Names have been capitalized, which is not conventional with mammals, though it is with birds. Older scientific and English names used by Cowan in his publications are cited as he described them at the time, followed by [the contemporary name in square brackets]. Common regional names (in round brackets) have been included for clarity. All the variations of a name are included only at first mention of the species; otherwise the name is as Cowan cited it in his journal at the time. For example:

Franklin Grouse (Fool Hen) [Spruce Grouse]

Canachites franklinii [Canachites canadensis franklinii]

In addition to mentions in the text, dozens of species are highlighted in magazine-style sidebars throughout, with descriptive text by Cowan as author or coauthor in recognized reference works. All sources are duly cited of course, but because these descriptions and archival photos were compiled separately, and long before the book was in layout, their endnote numbers will not necessarily track the sequence of note numbers in the adjacent text. Neither will they necessarily be consecutive.

In other words, wherever note numbers appear to be missing in action or out of order, you’ll find them loyally serving in sidebars located somewhere nearby. There are two more elements to consider as you navigate the book, which in part require a crash course on the colonial history of the naming of animals. The first is that taxonomies have changed over the decades. Subspecies have become species and vice versa. For example, the Franklin Grouse has been downlisted to a subspecies of the Spruce Grouse. Keen’s Mouse was elevated from a subspecies of the Deer Mouse to a species unto itself. The other complicating element is that in the early 20th century, when splitting into subspecies was more in vogue, subspecies would get their own standard English names. That tradition is not as robust today – which is sad, I think – and the subspecies are often lumped together under the common species name, which is captured in the square brackets of the common name:

Olympic Meadow Mouse [Long-tailed Vole]

Microtus mordax macrurus [Microtus longicaudus macrurus]

All of these elements of nomenclature have cultural and political ramifications. When we give a name to a distinctive animal (a subspecies or even a population) that is special to one’s region, it enters our culture as a valued thing. For example, the Southern Resident Orca or the Kermode (Spirit) Bear have won a place in the hearts and culture of British Columbians. Our biggest industry, tourism, thrives on this Super, Natural branding. When our common names take in the various subspecies, some of which are locally endangered, some not, it is possible that this makes us less able to express our concern and rally support. Take for example the Horned Lark. It is common on the prairies, but around the Fraser lowlands it is nearly extirpated. How much better to have Vancouver Horned Lark as a name so that residents can embrace it as their own? Surely one of the big casualties of globalization and efficiency is the standardization of names. (The sources relied on for the current common and scientific names of species are listed in the Bibliography under Taxonomy authorities.)

Having argued against this homogenization, however, there is one name that I have standardized for this book: that of Ian McTaggart Cowan himself. Throughout his century he signed himself variously as Ian Cowan, Ian McTaggart Cowan, I.M. Cowan, I. McT. Cowan, I. McTaggart-Cowan and Ian McTaggart-Cowan. The hyphenation of his name doesn’t really start appearing in his published works until after 1982, which is when the field journals, the main source of material, end. An added confusion was that his father’s first name was McTaggart, last name Cowan. To make it easy for the reader, all references to Ian are simply Cowan. In the bibliography he is Cowan, Ian McTaggart. This is purely to keep it simple and focus the reader’s attention on more important things like the ability of Pocket Gopher to detect subtle changes in carbon dioxide, which we might find useful one day.

Finally, many readers who knew Ian may be disappointed not to find references here to particular events, people or places. The gaps in this account are as large as those in the evolutionary record. It is a life that bears far more examination. The Jakimchuk, Campbell and Demarchi book fills in many of these, especially as to Cowan’s students and teaching career. I have relied heavily on others but take full responsibility for any errors or omissions. Cowan’s journals, correspondence and the specimens are now all in the public realm for others to help reconstruct not only a life well lived but also the story of ecosystems that have suffered. I have just tried to do what he always hoped to do: to tell the story of beautiful British Columbia and encourage people to conserve it, for there will be no biographies on a dead planet.

Part 1

The Early Years:

1910–1920

CHAPTER 1

Something inside you brings out the interest track.

Edinburgh, 1910–1913

Ian McTaggart Cowan’s birthplace, Edinburgh, Scotland, is an elegant university city of granite spires and cobbled streets at the edge of a once rich inland sea. It was built around an extinct volcano that had been left untamed by virtue (or not) of a thousand years of monarchs demanding an exclusive place to hunt. Ironically, this wild heart of the city became the wellspring of a scientific and humanistic renaissance that inspired the likes of Charles Darwin, pioneer geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell, botanists Joseph Hooker, John Hutton Balfour and David Douglas and naturalist and early environmentalist John Muir, who grew up just south of the city at Dunbar. Teeming with naturalists and pioneering scientists, Edinburgh was the habitat of the Scottish Enlightenment that began in the 18th century. Its inhabitants had a profound impact on western science and thought, as they, their progeny and their ideas disseminated around the world like the down of the ubiquitous Scottish Thistle.7

Cowan was born into the lineage of these scientists andtheir tradition in a city – dubbed the Modern Athens – which already boasted a Museum of Natural History, a Zoological Gardens and a Botanical Gardens, all popular institutions within walking distance of the Cowan family home on Great King Street. Natural history museums were attracting more families like the Cowans than even attended football (soccer) games at the time.8 Pubs were probably the only institution that still surpassed museums for attendance amongst the burgeoning 19th century middle class. By the turn of that century, natural history societies, such as the Botanical Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Wernerian Society and the Plinian Society (most of which were started or attended by Cowan’s ancestors), were approaching their 100th anniversaries. In these societies lay the intellectual origins of western modern ecology and conservation biology, which Cowan was to embrace and expand upon.

It was also a place impoverished by human mismanagement of wildlife and ecosystems and by social inequity. By 1910 the North Sea populations of herring that underpinned the marine life were collapsing through overfishing. The hills, once covered in temperate rainforest, had long been deforested. Enclosures of large estates by elite landowners, who overstocked them with sheep or deer, ensured little chance of forest regeneration. The once extensive Caledonian pine forests of Scotland were down to a few scanty patches of compromised trees in the northern parts of the country. Intensive farming in the lowlands and nearly two centuries of gamekeeping on the vast private estates, where every predator found was shot, had left a greatly simplified fauna and flora.

In his infamous autobiography, naturalist and hunter Osgood Mackenzie writes approvingly of the lethal efforts of his family to kill vermin during the mid-19th century when many of the extirpations were underway.

The vermin consisted of all kinds of beasts and birds, a good many of which are now extinct … The last kite had disappeared before my time. … The pine martens, the polecats, and the badgers are all quite extinct with us now, but they were all still in existence when I bought Inverewe [northwest Scotland.9

The last wolf in Scotland had been shot dead in the Findhorn Valley by the 18th century, while introduced plants like Broom, Gorse and Bracken dominated the hills. Mackenzie’s family is credited with moving feral rabbits into the northwest of Scotland. My grandfather introduced them … from England…10 Cowan attributed the impoverishment to the land-grabbing aristocracy of Britain, who had already taken to themselves one acre of every seven in the nation.11 Scotland in 1913 was, in modern terms, a wildly unbalanced ecosystem that was most memorable to a child for its plague of rabbits.

It was this introduced species that captured Ian McTaggart Cowan’s imagination as a 3-year-old, prior to his own introduction into North America. Two feral populations of the European Rabbit have persisted in

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and curiously were linked to Cowan until the end of his life. One feral colony survived on remote Triangle Island (now an ecological reserve) in competition with a subspecies of Townsend’s Vole, Microtus townsendii cowani, unique to the island and named after Cowan by his student Charles Guiguet. The other feral colony reached plague proportions on the campus of the University of Victoria, where Cowan as chancellor would trip over them on the walk to his office, not unlike his childhood memories from Holyrood Park.

Cowan attributed early expeditions with his mother and uncle, with rabbits popping in and out of their burrows on either side of the track, to igniting his curiosity as a budding naturalist and stimulating a lifelong fascination with wildlife. From the family’s elegant Georgian townhouse flat one can see the extinct volcano of Arthur’s Seat, which dominates the park. A rare example, even then, of unploughed native grasslands, the park is a pocket wilderness in the midst of a city. In 1913, rabbit populations were exploding in the park due to the indiscriminate shooting of their predators – golden eagles and other raptors – by the Queen’s gamekeepers, who, according to Osgood Mackenzie, were in reality only game-killers.13 The introduced European Hare (Lepus europaeus) was also occupying the park, while the native Mountain Hare, or Blue Hare (named timidus after its temperament), had long been driven back to the summits of the remotest mountainous regions of Scotland.

The Scottish landscape became imprinted on Cowan from these early forays, as did the tragic history of the extirpations of species and ecosystems. Forty years later he would return on sabbatical to the city of his birth to write The Mammals of British Columbia, as well as to introduce scientific concepts of wilderness and wildlife management developed in British Columbia to Scottish policy-makers and landowners. Scotland, besides exporting enlightened ideas, had been exporting some of the most lethal methods for exploitation of resources, from clear-cutting of forests to bounties on wild animals. Cowan was a fierce critic of Scotland’s indiscriminate killing of predators, the privatization of wildlife, unscientific wildlife management, failure to conserve natural ecosystems, introduction of invasive species and the impacts all of this had on animal, and ultimately human, health. The Scottish–German philosophy is quite different [from the North American]. That is, an elitist take on it: if you own an estate, you own the wildlife on it.15

Artificial manipulation of animal populations by introducing diseases was also well underway the year he returned to Scotland in 1952. Myxomatosis – with its characteristic suppurating tumours around rabbits’ eyes – had just been introduced into Europe, wiping out 95 per cent of the invasive rabbit population but also adversely impacting the native lynx and Spanish Imperial eagle. The disease would reach Scotland the following spring, with similar effects. Cowan was to hold a critical view of simplified human interventions with pathogens, arguing for maintaining complex ecosystems. That same December of 1952, the first specimen of an introduced Eastern Cottontail Rabbit in

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was caught and prepared by Cowan’s mentor and father-in-law Kenneth Racey with his son Alan at their farm at Huntingdon on the

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–Washington border.16 Hares and rabbits were to leap in and out of burrows along Cowan’s track for his entire life.

Cowan claimed that his memories of rabbits also started him on his interest in population ecology. In one of his first published articles, he looked at the accounts of fur trappers and compared them to his own observations in the field, linking the economic cycle of fur-bearing animals like foxes with their choicest prey, the Snowshoe Hare. He wrote:

In 1932, … in 4 miles along the Cariboo Highway … I counted upwards of 150 rabbits [Snowshoe Hares] feeding on the edge of the road. … Two years later, in the same district, not a rabbit was to be seen. … It so happens that rabbit conditions have been recorded over a period of 174 years in Canada; and it has been shown … that they reach a period of abundance on the average every 9.7 years.18

The cycles of small prey mammals would feature strongly not only in his formulation of prey–predator relationships but also in his innovative attempts to stop human persecution of predators, whether eagles, lynxes or wolves. The continuing survival of many predator species in

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has a great deal to do with Cowan’s early observations of boom–bust cycles of rabbits and hares. It was a topic which connected into the pioneering work of population ecologist Charles Elton, whom Cowan would meet back in Scotland 40 years later. Cowan’s national campaign to stop the bounty system in Canada wouldn’t start until the 1940s, but the groundwork was already being laid in his childhood.

He lightheartedly enlisted rabbits in the opening remarks of his 1961 public lecture Of Mice and Men, to chuckles from his audience:

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, this business of animal numbers is an interesting and important one. It is one of certain rather dramatic complexities. I am always amused by the little story that came to me some years ago about two little rabbits on a fine spring morning that were chased into a hollow log by two hunting dogs on a spree. It is reported that the rabbits said to one another: Say, let’s stay here until we outnumber them. This they’re very well equipped to do.19

The topic of that lecture was the diversity of ways that populations of animals regulate and/or are regulated by their environment, leading to the inevitable discussion of the question of human populations – a subject that was to increasingly interest him as the world’s population doubled during each generation he lived through. Fittingly, he would name a subspecies of one of

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’s native Snowshoe Hares (also called Varying Hare then) (Lepus americanus pallidus Cowan).20 Cowan’s subspecies was a pale-reddish-brown hare with a darker-reddish face and long legs that inhabits the mountain ranges on the west side of the Rockies, a not inaccurate description of the man himself.

His second published work, at the age of 20, included his notes on another subspecies, the Washington Hare, which he described as the darkest of the hares, a rich chestnut brown, or sayal brown liberally blended with black hair-tips.22 Cowan’s aesthetic eye for discerning the details of animals distinguished him to all his students and colleagues. The Washington Hare population had briefly exploded on the

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campus during the years he studied zoology there. He noted in a 1930 article that there were plenty of hares as a direct result of their predators being exterminated.23 He would later return to

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, as a professor, and it was there that his crusade against the bounty system was launched.24

Mountains were Cowan’s second earliest memory and they captivated his imagination. His mother, a keen naturalist (and occasional naturist), had taken him up into the Scottish hills, and he remembers her shedding her clothes to dip into a burbling, chilly mountain stream, which set him howling.25 His third memory is of picking up a bird’s egg. At the time, the heathlands of Holyrood Park would have had healthy populations of pipits, skylarks, partridges and corncrakes, all ground nesters.26 Even today, Meadow Pipits can be seen providing their exceptional spring aerial displays and distinctive pip pip pip calls to any curious child wandering the grassy slopes of Arthur’s Seat. Cowan was to enjoy these attractive birds right until his death. The North American cousin of the Meadow Pipit, the American Pipit, nests in the Rocky Mountains he loved and migrates through the low-lying fields close to his homes, first in Vancouver, then Vancouver Island.

When he described these earliest memories at the age of 90, he commented on the fact that they were all about nature, which makes me think there must be something built in that starts you on an interest track.28 Mammals, birds and mountains did indeed dominate Cowan’s career. The impressionable early childhood experiences also led him to become a strong advocate for childhood immersion in nature. This became a recurring theme in his popular writing, lecturing, television programs, leading of student expeditions and with his own children. Not surprisingly, his first television program, Fur and Feathers, was aimed at children and involved bringing live animals and a child together in a studio and filming their interaction.

Cowan’s precocious observational skills and interest as an educator were right in keeping with the lineage of Scots academics and naturalists into which he was born. This included the elite of the scientific establishment stretching back to the 18th century and the start of the Scottish Enlightenment. Through his father’s line he was related to both James Hutton, the father of modern geology and first western thinker to conceive of the earth as millions of years old, and John Hutton Balfour, a major figure in botany and evolution and part of the Hooker–Darwin naturalist cohort.

James Hutton, born in Edinburgh in 1726, was one of the city’s leading lights. He attended Edinburgh, Paris and Leiden universities, studying medicine and chemistry, and had a wide range of interests – not least his great curiosity about how the world worked. This led Hutton first to a life as a gentleman farmer so he could pursue his naturalist studies. He was a collector of fossils, and his observational skills were legendary. In the course of rambles on his land in and around Edinburgh, he was able to develop a comprehensive theory of the history of the earth from the geological evidence he saw at places like Salisbury Crags in Holyrood Park and Siccar Point just south of Edinburgh along the coast. Salisbury Crags is a section of old seabed through which the volcanic rock of Arthur’s Seat has oozed or intruded. It triggered a theory which a subsequent expedition to Siccar Point proved. Hutton took two gentlemen from the Royal Society, John Playfair and Sir James Hall, to view a rock exposure on the battered cliffs that would prove one of the most stunning claims in the history of science – that the [age of the] earth was beyond calculation.29

Siccar Point is a heavily eroded cliff headland with exposed layers of two distinct types of sedimentary rock. At the bottom of the cliff were layers of shale standing straight up like books on a shelf and on top were horizontal layers of younger red sandstone sandwiching a middle layer of muddled rock and sand. Wrote Playfair:

We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean … The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time…30

Cowan too developed an expertise in fossils and the intimate interplay of geology and evolution. He was to stand gazing at the same geological features in 1953 with some of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the time, pondering that relationship.

Hutton expounded his theories of deposition and erosion in his famous address to the newly formed Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788. Close to 200 years later Cowan would deliver a lecture to the same society on the evolutionary history of vertebrate fauna in western North America. Hutton identified the processes that drove the shaping of landscape, from the role of rain to the force of heat from the earth’s centre, as an explanation for volcanoes, mountain building, hot springs and metamorphic rocks. He presented his findings under the concepts of actualism and uniformitarianism, proposing that, contrary to the biblical interpretations by the theologians, these earth processes had been going on for millions of years and were still at work shaping the present-day landscape. Cowan identified the processes of ice sheets sweeping down the continent and changing sea levels shaping the landscape, separating populations of animals and plants, creating refugia on islands, mountaintops and coastal plains. He described how new species were emerging after isolation of just 5,000 years before the great repopulation of the glaciated landscape. Both men were storytellers in their own new scientific paradigm.

The audience at Cowan’s 1952 Royal Society lecture would have been entertained by the tale he told of the age-old migration routes of small birds such as wheatears that still flew 30,000-kilometre routes which had been shaped and deflected by the old ice sheets. He described witnessing the elegant little birds breeding in the Mackenzie Delta of Canada, migrating through Scotland and landing on the ship in which he was travelling off Denmark the week before, to rest on their way to Africa for the winter.

Hutton’s successors were Thomas Hope and Charles Lyell (who largely was given the credit for Hutton’s ideas, although he himself credited Hutton). Lyell mentored Darwin, and Darwin’s imagination around biological evolution was triggered by Hutton’s narrative of an ancient earth and a set of processes that could shape the landscape – and its inhabitants as well. In his later work of 1794, Hutton proposed a form of natural selection for animals.32 Darwin was exposed to this work during his natural history and medical studies in Edinburgh 35 years later. It was in this intertidal zone of fecund intellectual activity that Cowan was spawned.

While these ideas, like the species that accompanied the colonizers, were being broadcast across Europe and into the colonies, the bastion of conservatism was showing no signs of crumbling. Even more impenetrable than Castle Rock in Edinburgh (another geological feature that helped armies defend the castle for millennia), the orthodox sects of the Scottish Presbyterian church were still entrenched in their belief that the earth was 6,000 years old, fortified by their 17th century religious scholars who had declared that fossils were animals lost during a recent biblical flood. Hutton sidestepped accusations of heresy by a combination of good humour and a more moderate strain of Presbyterian faith that inoculated him from the worst of the Scottish witch hunts. It was a family tradition to skirt religious orthodoxy through a scientific approach that incorporated conventional societal beliefs.

Two centuries later, Cowan was to encounter cyclical revivals of the 6,000-year-old-earth story during his own career. He handled these challenges with the same dexterity as Hutton. The last decade of his life saw the election of a Canadian prime minister who was a member of a creationist, young earth evangelical church. Approaching his 100th birthday, Cowan nevertheless received a letter of congratulation from that same prime minister, although their beliefs couldn’t have varied more widely, nor could they have disagreed more on the value of scientists. Cowan carried a historical sensibility of the tension between the creationists and the humanists that provided credibility in his profession and opportunities for humour. Among the marginalia of his journal during the 1952 trip to Scotland, he wrote a note-to-self: The display leks [breeding grounds] of some grouse are not matrimonial bureaus, but revival meetings.

Cowan’s relationship to Hutton was through his great grandmother, Margaret Balfour. She was related to Sarah Balfour, Hutton’s mother. Margaret was also John Hutton Balfour’s sister. Balfour founded the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1836 – coincidentally one block away from Cowan’s birthplace on Great King Street – and helped build up a vast botanical collection and herbarium. Balfour was cut from the same cloth as Hutton, tromping through the countryside with an indefatigable enthusiasm. Rising to become chair of botany at Glasgow, succeeding William Hooker, Darwin’s mentor, Balfour eventually beat out William’s son Joseph Hooker for the botany chair at Edinburgh in 1845, and finished his career as the Queen’s Botanist (Regius Keepership) for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh.33 The battle between Balfour and Joseph Hooker for the chair was famous, and instructive, as it played against a backdrop of political and religious schisms that would be reenacted in various permutations in Cowan’s own career.

The Hooker–Balfour battle would also involve a betrayal of friendship and determine the value placed on mentorship by society. Balfour and Hooker had been fellow students and friends and shared many expeditions together. As Hooker once wrote to Balfour:

… many a time do I think over our excursions in the Highlands together & to the W. of Ireland – Do you remember sleeping under the old blanket in Glen Isla? When you would not go to sleep for asking me whether I was warm, & getting heather for my feet.34

The fight over the position became acrimonious and the eventual decision by the board that awarded Balfour the position of chair and keepership over Hooker involved two qualities that were upheld above all: his sense of justice and his support of students even above research.35

Like his ancestor Hutton, Balfour didn’t limit himself to a narrow specialty but developed an extraordinary breadth of interests, from medicine to molluscs. The similar range of Cowan’s interests was entirely on par with this indefatigable family. In a testimonial written by William Carpenter, a fellow of the Botanical Society and former president of the Royal Medical Society, Edinburgh, promoting his colleague for an appointment as professor in 1841 at Edinburgh, a portrait of Balfour emerges that eerily resembles the testimonial for Cowan almost exactly 100 years later for his first position as professor at the University of British Columbia. In this description of Cowan’s ancestor, one can simply substitute zoology for botany and the portrait is the same:

Dr. Balfour has cultivated both systematic and physiological botany during many years with great assiduity. He has always appeared to me to possess a peculiar natural aptitude for the pursuit, combining great quickness of observation with a retentive memory, and both these with intellectual powers which have been most advantageously cultivated by previous education, and with that ardent desire for truth which thinks no amount of labour in the search for it too great. These talents he has employed with a zeal, originating alike in natural temperament, and in earnest attachment to his object; and his attainments in botanical science have thus become of a very high order – such as, in fact, would do great credit to any one who had made it his sole pursuit during a long life … I feel confident that by his own evident enthusiasm, he would do much to excite the ardour of his pupils whilst his pleasure in witnessing their improvement would lead him to do all in his power to promote it.36

Peter Ommundsen, a student of Cowan’s for many years, recalled the qualities of Cowan in the field:

I think something about Ian that would strike me in any circumstance was going the extra mile and encouraging us to go the extra mile … He could see things that other people didn’t see, patterns that others didn’t see. I remember, for example, we were down at Mount Baker [Washington] one day and he saw a mountain sheep in the distance, and this was absolutely phenomenal because at that time there was no record of mountain sheep anywhere near there. I think that’s the type of thing – in that