Charles M. Hoy

Charles McCauley Hoy (1897–1923) was a field naturalist who obtained series of mammal and bird specimens for United States National Museum, travelling on expeditions to Australia, China and elsewhere.

His successful collecting in that region included becoming the first occidental researcher to obtain a species of rare river dolphin, but his works were curtailed by complications arising from childhood illness – while convalescing from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot injury[1] – and he died there in 1923.

[4][5] The information and material he obtained on his excursions from 1919 to 1922 provides valuable details in the aftermath of what is regarded as extraordinary decline in mammalian fauna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

[5] Hoy was also the author of 'The Present Status of the Australian Mammal Fauna', published in the Journal of Mammalogy in 1923,[4] an important article that was not noticed until a literature review on the same topic at the end of that century.

After investigation by an Australian researcher of the material deposited by Charles Hoy at the US Museum of Natural History, the records and interviews in his unpublished papers and letters were revealed and examined.

The anecdotal and incidental material in his field notes had been disregarded by earlier researchers, containing little of use to the reductive approach of his contemporaries, but a valuable source of information to the pluralistic methods of the ecologists and others examining the catastrophic decline of Australian mammals.