Runner-up for the 1985 Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing!

Hamilton Mack Laing was a long lived, widely published, notable Canadian naturalist. His love was birds but his writing and his collecting expeditions were wider than his special interest. Born in Ontario in 1883, Laing grew up on a Manitoba farm, did post-secondary schooling in the eastern United States, travelled the American midwest and coast on a "new fangled, infernal machine" called a motorcycle and, ultimately, settled in the bird paradise of Comox, B.C. Laing's naturalist beliefs were common to his era: animal management was part of healthy environmental work. Management meant shooting and trapping "bad" animals to preserve the "good" animals. This biography explores a man and a philosophy of conservation that insisted the naturalist be a good man with a gun.

Biography, 234 pp, 6 x 9, b/w photos
ISBN 0-919203-74-4, cloth, $25.00