The story of an obsessive search for the blue goose’s breeding grounds
The story of J. Dewey Soper’s dogged pursuit of an ornithological mystery
IT MAY BE TEMPTING to call J. Dewey Soper’s search for the breeding grounds of the blue goose a wild you-know-what, but that groan-worthy quip would be a gross mischaracterization. After all, during his six-year, 50,000-kilometre odyssey, the Canadian naturalist tracked down and pinpointed a location that had long confounded ornithologists across North America. The map above shows the site of the bird’s breeding grounds, which Soper located on the southwest coast of Baffin Island in 1929 — but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Soper began his search for the blue goose (a colour variant of the lesser snow goose) in 1923, when he joined a federal government expedition to the eastern Arctic, visiting Greenland and Ellesmere, Devon and Baffin islands. “I resolved then,” he wrote in a 1930 issue of The Canadian Field-naturalist of his quarry, “to devote myself to the discovery of the Blue Goose nesting grounds insofar as I was empowered to do so.” Over the next three years, the last two of which were spent on another expedition to Baffin Island, Soper followed every lead he could unearth, to no avail. By the end of the winter of 1925-26, during which he’d travelled more than 1,600 kilometres across the island improving maps, collecting wildlife samples and speaking with Inuit about the blue goose, he remained stumped. “After a personal residence of nearly two years in the country,” he wrote, “the species remained almost as great a mystery as before.” But he was getting closer. In the summer of 1926, two Inuit in Cape Dorset told Soper the birds nested around Bowman Bay, about 200 kilometres to the northeast. It was too late in the season for Soper to investigate, however, and he didn’t return until the summer of 1928, this time at the behest of the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch of the Department of the Interior. By mid-may 1929, armed with a map of breeding grounds drawn the previous fall by an Inuk named Saila, Soper and five Inuit were heading to Bowman Bay by sledge. About a month later and not far from their camp, which they’d named Kungovik — Inuktitut for blue goose — Soper and two of his Inuit companions found what they’d been searching for: blue goose nests and eggs. Accounts of Soper’s success appeared in newspapers and Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, but in 1957 the Canadian government immortalized “Blue Goose Soper,” as he’d become known, in a way that seemed more fitting: by establishing the Dewey Soper Migratory Bird Sanctuary on Baffin Island, today home to the largest known lesser snow goose colony in the world.
*with files from Erika Reinhardt, archivist, Library and Archives Canada