Charles McCann

Charles McCann
Charles McCann in 1939
Born	Castle Rock, Karnataka

Yule Mervyn Charles McCann (4 December 1899 – 29 November 1980) was a naturalist in India. He wrote a popular book on the trees of India and edited a major regional flora apart from publishing many of his other observations, mainly in the journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) that he was associated with.

Born at Castle Rock in India, his exposure to the wilderness during his childhood in the forests of the Goa area shaped his lifelong interest in natural history:

He studied at St. Mary's High school at Mazagaon in Bombay (now Mumbai) and worked for a while under Father Ethelbert Blatter at St. Xavier's College as a laboratory assistant and curator. During 1916-1920 he worked under Blatter on botany. He briefly worked with the Bombay city police and then joined the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) as a collector for the Mammal Survey. He worked on the survey around 1921-22 in the Palni Hills and also in the Indus delta areas.

McCann became the Assistant Curator and served as editor of the Journal of the BNHS. He was involved in the development of the Natural History galleries of the Prince of Wales Museum of Bombay. He was a prolific writer and published 200 articles and papers in the Journal of the BNHS, covering plants, birds, mammals and insects. He was also a fellow of the Linnean Society of London.

In 1946 he resigned his post at the BNHS and migrated to New Zealand. The Executive Committee of the Bombay Natural History Society noted:

In New Zealand he joined the Dominion Museum (now Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) at Wellington as a Vertebrate Zoologist. He became interested in the whale and seal collections as well as deep-sea fishes. He also made significant contributions to New Zealand herpetology.

The BNHS instituted the Charles McCann Vertebrate Fieldwork Fund in his memory to promote field research.

McCann married Eleanor Mary Allen (b. 1906) and they had three children Carlyle (“Carl”) Ethelbert McCann (1928–1995), Trevor Ian McCann (1930–2006) and Marie Dolores McCann (1934–2005). After the death of Eleanor in 1956 he married Muriel Florence Mottershead and they had a son Robbie McCann.