The Motorcycle Naturalist

It was through a typical reference request from a researcher that I first encountered Hamilton Mack Laing. Laing was a fascinating Comox resident who lived a remarkable life. He helped promote the natural history of British Columbia to a national and international audience and contributed to the scientific knowledge of western Canada’s wildlife. As I explored his records as part of this inquiry, I realized that I wanted to learn more about him.

Laing and his brother on their US transcontinental bike trip, 1915. Laing was born in Ontario in 1883 and raised in Manitoba. In 1922 he moved to Vancouver Island, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He was first and foremost a student of nature, which was demonstrated through his prolific writings, drawings and photography. He was also an avid hunter, amateur ornithologist and nut farmer.

The Hamilton Laing collection (PR-0616) comprises almost seven metres of textual records and over 7,000 photographs, most of which depict birds and animals. The collection comprises many unpublished and published books and articles relating to the natural history of western Canada and the United States, a vast amount of correspondence, and many of Laing’s highly detailed drawings of wildlife. In addition, we hold the field notebooks from his research trips, and his private diaries. (continues next page)

Laing at Chitina River, Alaska, 1925. Laing demonstrating the pattern of wing growth of a Bonaparte’s gull for one of his articles, c. 1935.

The Laing collection is a vast treasure trove of knowledge relating primarily to the natural history of British Columbia. Laing wrote extensively about what he knew and experienced, and brought his world of British Columbia and the great outdoors to audiences around the world. He wrote numerous articles for scientific publications, as well as about 700 pieces for various outdoors magazines in Canada, the USA and the UK, many of which are now housed in the BC Archives. He was also the author of a few books, including Bird Rambles in British Columbia and a biography of the ornithologist Allan Brooks.

From an early age, his passion was the outdoors and studying, collecting and drawing wildlife. Combining his love of art and nature, he attended an art program at the Pratt Institute in New York from 1911 to 1914 with the intention of forging a career as a writer-naturalist and illustrating his own work. During his studies he continued writing articles for nature magazines such as Field and Stream and Recreation. Using the proceeds from the sale of articles, he bought his first motorbike, a Harley-Davidson that he named Barking Betsy.

Upon graduating from Pratt in 1915, he used Betsy to make one of the first transcontinental trips across the United States, travelling from New York to Portland, Oregon, with his brother to visit his parents, who had moved there. The two-wheeled trip across the United States gave the self-described “motorcyle-naturalist” the opportunity to sleep under the stars, see new places and to do what he loved best: study wildlife, particularly birds. The trip also gave him plenty of inspiration for his articles.

In 1920, after a chance meeting with Dr. Frances Harper of the Brooklyn Museum, Laing was invited to participate in a research trip funded by the Smithsonian Institute to study and collect bird life from the Lake Athabasca region for a study of migratory birds. This trip was to be the first of several large expeditions for Laing to study and collect various animal and bird species across western Canada and the United States on behalf of various museums, including the Provincial Museum in Victoria (now the Royal BC Museum) and the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa (now the Canadian Museum of Nature).

In 1924 he was invited to work as a naturalist on the HMCS Thiepval expedition to Japan, and the following year he worked as field guide on the trip to summit Mount Logan in Alaska. In the summer of 1930 he was hired for a season by the Dominion Parks Branch (later Parks Canada) as the first park naturalist in a Canadian national park (Banff and Lake Louise).