^nadian forestrp 3oumal 



VOL. XIV. 



OTTAWA, CANADA, MARCH, 1919 



JACK MINER AND HIS WILD FOWL 



The Story of a Remarkable Experiment in At- 

 tracting the Birds of the Air. 



(From Mr. Miner's Address given at the Annual Meeting of the 

 Commission of Conservation) 



No. 3 



I assure you it is a privilege for me to meet 

 with so many bird lovers. We love out-of-door 

 creatures, or we would not be here this morning. 



Now, you will have to pardon my lack of ed- 

 ucation. I am one of those men who are born 

 bare-footed and educated out-of-doors. How- 

 ever, I was my father's favorite. Perhaps it is 

 not just the proper thing for fathers to show 

 partiality, but mine did. He always called me 

 in the morning to build the fires; possibly in 

 that way I got out a little earlier than the rest 

 to hear the birds singing. 



Outside of unavoidable sadness, my Hfe has 

 been one continuous round of enjoyment; the 

 failures and disappointments and the dark 

 storm clouds have been wiped out of existence 

 by success, by out-of-door life — a light which 

 has brightened my path right up to the present 

 and given me a faint glimpse of the beyond. I 

 have heard people say that they have read that 

 there was never a tribe of heathen discovered 

 on earth who did not worship some kind of god. 

 No intelligent man can live out-of-doors without 

 being compelled to believe that there is an over- 

 ruling power. 



The Domain of Man. 



God created the fowls of the air, and so on, 

 before He created man, according to Genesis 1st 

 chapter and 21st verse. Th?n in the 26th verse 

 we find these words: "And God said, 'Let us 

 make man in our image, and after our likeness, 

 and let them have dominion over the fish of the 

 sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the 

 cattle, and over the earth, and over every 

 creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth'." 

 Does that mean that we are to have dominion 

 over these big flocks of wild geese, so far away 

 that you have to look twice to see them? You 

 know how high they sometimes are ; you can 



hear them. That is what it says, gentlemen. 

 Then we read further in Deuteronomy chapter 

 22, 6th and 7th verses: "If a bird's nest chance 

 to be before thee in the way in any tree, or on 

 the ground, whether they be young ones or eggs, 

 and the dam sitting upon the young, or upon 

 the eggs, thou shalt not take the dam with the 

 young: but thou shalt in any wise let the dam 

 go, and take the young to thee; that it may be 

 well with thee, and that thou mayest prolong 

 thy days". But, if a duck lit in one of the 

 rivers here, all of us educated people would rush 

 down — there would be ten guns out there to 

 shoot it. Reading in the book of Job, we find 

 these words : 



"No doubt but ye are the people, and wis- 

 dom shall die with you. Bat I have under- 

 standing as well as you; I am not inferior to 

 you: Yea, who knoweth not such things as 

 these? 



"But ask now the beasts, and they shall 

 teach thee ; and the fowls of the air. and they 

 shall teach thee." 



His First Experiment. 

 When the first barn swallows came to our 

 tile shed, on our little farm at Kingsville, Ont., 

 they nested 300 feet away — ^as far away as they 

 could get from where we were working. We 

 protected the swallows from their deadly enemy, 

 the sparrow that man brought to Canada (he 

 English Sparrow; not the one that God put 

 here, don't forget that. They destroyed the first 

 brood, but we protected the swallows, and con- 

 sequently the sparrows didn't destroy any more. 

 Remember, the shed had stood there for ten 

 years, ecjually as inviting. The second year 

 there were two nests: the fifth year there are 

 twenty nests in the tile shed, and, instead of 

 being as far from us as they can get, fifteen out 



