File:The Canadian field-naturalist (2000) (20333073459).jpg

Title: The Canadian field-naturalist
Identifier: canadianfieldnat114otta (find matches)
Year: 1919 (1910s)
Authors: Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club
Subjects:
Publisher: Ottawa, Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club
Contributing Library: Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library

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2000 Edwards: Tribute to Charles Joseph Guiguet 713
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Charles J. Guiguet in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park, near Stuie, British Columbia. 16 September 1938. B.C. Archives, Province of British Columbia, Photo number 6-03674. worked in summers in wild parts of the province. For 32 years his summers were usually extensions of the earlier summers when he was collecting for the National Museum. His winters were filled with enlarging and caring for the vertebrate collections, writing books, and informing the public through radio, meetings and publications. He was with the museum until retirement in 1980. In the field his goal was partly biological and part- ly geographical, which together was — like Laing — discovering where birds and mammals lived. He col- lected throughout the province, in the south from our almost countless coastal islands and nearby moun- tains, across the Okanagan and Cariboo plains into the mountainous Kootenay region. Later he was in the north, working from Alberta west through the Cassiar mountains to Alaska. For years Charlie's makeshift laboratory in Victoria was in a cottage near the museum. Equally makeshift, the vertebrate collections were stored in the attic under the roof of the museum, which was then in the east wing of the main Provincial Government Building. (That wing was finished in 1896 where it housed the museum until 1972.) The attic had no floor, so both storage cabinets and their Curator balanced on the floor joists, a fragile ceiling below a few inches underfoot and at considerable risk. In 1972 the collections were properly stored near a modem laboratory in a new museum building. Through later years in the museum he became increasingly interested in the province's hundreds of coastal islands. Many are located near the main- land's shore as well as near Vancouver Island and the two large Queen Charlotte Islands. His island hunts were searches in those small and isolated habi- tats, looking for nesting sea birds and also hoping to find Deer Mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) which he called "the most plastic mammals in the province". His mammal study was before the time for help from DNA, so he relied on sizes and colours for proposing new subspecies. The museum's book The Mammals of British Columbia contained a list of 23 subspecies of Peromyscus, most of them isolated on islands. In 1974 he listed in Syesis, the museum's armual journal, all mammal species he had found on his island searches. His home was in Oak Bay, a residential part of greater Victoria. Next to it is ocean water, also called Oak Bay. He found that nine islands in or near the bay appeared to be suitable for Deer Mice, but did not have them. He then took mice from Vancouver Island in the small forest on the property of the

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