Charles William Mason (13 May 1884 – 28 November 1917) was an Agricultural entomologist who served in British India.
He conducted a pioneering study on the role of birds in Indian agriculture which he published in 1911 along with Harold Maxwell-Lefroy, making him one of the early contributors to the field of economic ornithology.
Mason was born in Surbiton, Surrey to engineer William Joshua and Eliza Emily née Walters.
He made use of numerical counts of food items eaten, following a system of Robert Newstead, rather than quantify them by biomass.
[4] He trained at the Southeastern Agricultural College, Wye in 1910 and in July 1913, he went to study entomology as a Carnegie student at the laboratory of parasitology of the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agriculture at Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts,[5] before moving to Nyasaland (Malawi) to succeed Edward Ballard as Government Entomologist.