Book to be published celebrating renowned UBC zoologist's life
By Larry Pynn, Vancouver SunApril 20, 2010
Ian McTaggart-Cowan in 2001. One of Canada's preeminent zoologists and early conservationists, he died Sunday just short of his 100th birthday.
Photograph by: ..., Vancouver Sun files
METRO VANCOUVER -- Wayne Campbell remembers Ian McTaggart-Cowan as the professor who kept him out of jail.
The retired curator of birds for the Royal B.C. Museum was just out of high school and busy at his hobby of egg collecting one June day in 1964. He was rummaging about for the common yellowthroat warbler when he found one at Deer Lake, next to Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby.
"I saw a female fly into a clump of sedges," Campbell recounted from his Victoria home on Tuesday. "The prisoners had finished their farming and had gone back to their cells.
"I was about 300 to 400 yards into the prison property. I crept, it was damp...and there was the nest.
"I collected it and the eggs and when I got back to the shore, guess what, there were two RCMP waiting for me. What do you do?"
Campbell hadn't brought his scientific egg-collecting permit, issued by the federal government. So he called McTaggart-Cowan, whom he'd met only once a few months earlier, in hopes a good reference might bail him out of trouble.
"He said he was very grateful I'd found the eggs and nest of this bird because they weren't well represented in the UBC collection."
It also didn't hurt that one of the Mounties took his zoology 101 course from McTaggart-Cowan.
Book to be published celebrating renowned UBC zoologist's life
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