Canada’s forgotten conservationist
Jack Miner turned from hunting wildfowl to protecting them and inspired others to do the same.
Every year, when Canadians observe National Wildlife Week during the week of April 10, they are paying tribute to the country’s greatest conservationist. The trouble is, most people today have never heard of him.
That is in stark contrast to eighty years ago, when Jack Miner was called Canada’s best-known private citizen by press clipping service surveys. The Kingsville, Ontario, resident had continental and worldwide fame, and Maclean’s magazine ranked him fifth on a list of the greatest living Canadians in 1927.
Born in Westlake, Ohio, on April 10, 1865, John (Jack) Miner went to school for only three months, was unable to read or to write, and remained illiterate until the age of thirty-three. The outdoors became his classroom, something that continued after his family moved to Kingsville, near the shore of Lake Erie, southeast of Windsor, in 1878.
In the 1880s, Miner became a professional trapper and hunter and spent almost a decade in the wilderness plying his trade. During this time, he began to notice a decline in the region’s once-abundant wildlife populations.
In 1900, Miner helped to form the Essex County Game Protective Association, one of the first hunter-based conservation groups in the country. Four years later, he built a pond on his farm two kilometres north of Kingsville and launched the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Sanctuary. Releasing several tame Canada geese into the pond, Miner waited for the birds to attract their wild brethren. However, it took another four years before wild geese began gathering at the sanctuary with regularity.
In 1909, Miner began to affix metal leg bands to the waterfowl who visited his refuge. The bands included Miner’s home address, along with a request to hunters to return the bands to him. A few years later, Miner started to add a scripture verse on each band.
Although it’s debated whether Miner or the American Leon Cole was the first person to band migratory birds, there is no doubt that in 1910 Miner was the first to receive return information regarding his bands. The data on bird migration patterns that he collected through banding became an essential piece of the information that was
considered during the creation of the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act in 1917. The Migratory Bird Treaty, signed by Canada and the United States, gave the federal government the ability to protect migratory birds and to implement waterfowl hunting regulations, including seasons and limits.
Needing money to pay for feed grain in his sanctuary, Miner started a lecture tour in 1910. The tour inspired local people and groups to create waterfowl sanctuaries across the continent. Miner then launched a radio show on conservation that developed a continent-wide following. In 1936, at the request of Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, Miner delivered the radio address to celebrate King George V’s twenty-fifth year as monarch.
Accolades continued to flow. In 1929, Miner became the first Canadian to receive Outdoor Life magazine’s gold medal “for the greatest achievement in wildlife conservation on the continent.” In 1943, King George VI inducted Miner into the Order of the British Empire, “for the greatest achievement in conservation in the British Empire.”
Miner was seventy-nine when he died on November 3, 1944. In obituaries, several American newspapers, including the New York Times, rated him as the fifth-most-well-known citizen on the continent, following four Americans: industrialist Henry Ford, inventor Thomas Edison, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and war hero and race car driver Eddie Rickenbacker.
In the negotiations between Miner’s family and legislators that followed the conservationist’s death, it was agreed that his birthday should be remembered as National Wildlife Day. Prime Minister King intervened and had the bill revamped to become the National Wildlife
Week Act. The bill passed with unanimous support. Today, the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Foundation still operates the sanctuary as well as a museum on his original farm near Kingsville.