Strung out along a country road, 40 miles southeast of Detroit, a crowd looks out across a stubbly field as a small truck moves toward a vast assemblage of birds. It’s 4 p.m. on a bright fall afternoon, time for one of nature’s spectacles, a soaring show above what one might call the O’Hare International Airport of Canada geese.
Up to 25,000 birds, each 13 pounds or more, with a wingspan of five feet, lift into the sky, wheeling overhead at up to 60 miles an hour. They land, many in V-formations, looking in the distance like swept-wing airplanes. Visitors often applaud at the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Sanctuary, about 2,000 acres roughly midpoint on a flyway between Hudson Bay and the southern United States. It’s the busiest goose-port in the world.
“It’s so beautiful, it’s breath-taking,” says Cheryl Miner, whose husband, Kirk, a grandson of the founder, drives the starting truck. Few disagree. Each day during southern migration, which lasts through November, Kirk Miner stirs up the geese to perform, leaving enough of them on the ground so the flyers feel safe to return. It’s an art form-and, come spring, he does it again for another six weeks, for flights heading north.
In the world of tourist attractions (your Eiffel Towers, your Great Walls of China, your Niagara Fallses), the Miner operation always has been something of an anomaly. It has been a going concern for almost 90 years. Some 10,000 cars have been counted on busy days. Yet there are no admission fees, no gift shops, no snack bars. You can’t even buy postcards here. As Jack Miner himself once pleaded, “Let there be one place on Earth where no money changes hands.”
“My grandfather’s wish always was that there be no commercialism, that nothing be sold on the property,” Kirk Miner said in an interview, “but it’s difficult to explain this to people. They see `no fees’ and they naturally assume you’re getting a government grant. When we tell them that we get no such funding, they ask, `Well, how do you keep it going?’ We point out that our endowment, mostly from small gifts, has been building for 60 years.”
It costs about $250,000 a year to run the place. Besides its open fields, the spread consists of a red-brick homestead, a museum, ponds, gardens and the 600-seat Playfair Stadium, glassed-in stands from which visitors can watch another, smaller fall-and-spring show of birds wheeling about at 1 and 3 p.m., except on Sundays, when everything on the Miner grounds except the big 4 p.m. air show shuts down.
Sundays were always important to Jack Miner, who turned to religion as solace after the death of two of his children in childhood and, ironically, a hunting accident in 1898 in which a family friend shot and killed Miner’s brother, Ted, while the friend and Ted were shooting at a moose.
He did not give up hunting, but Jack Miner felt “the urge to shoot gradually change into a desire to enjoy the living creatures,” as a biography once put it.
In 1904, on his farm near Kingsville, Miner set up his first pond sanctuary. Five years later, he banded a wintering duck, attaching a message to one leg asking any finder to let him know the geographical details.
It took a year, but a message came back from a doctor in South Carolina. Conservationists said it was the first accurate tracking of such a migration.
In 1915, after banding 50,000 more ducks, Miner turned to the patterns of a larger bird, the Canada goose. Using nets strung up behind the main house, Miner and his followers have banded more than 93,000 geese. About 60,000 have been tracked, along flight paths charted on a huge outdoor map.
So entranced with geese did Miner become that, when his writings were pulled together, the book was called “Wild Goose Jack, The Ever-Popular Story of Canada’s Most Famous Conservationist.” Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York called Miner “the Billy Sunday of the bird family,” a reference to a popular evangelist of the day. He preached from the Yukon to Carnegie Hall.
In 1927, Miner came to Chicago to address the Izaak Walton League. The event, at $10 a head, drew 1,200 people to a banquet at the Sherman House.
“Though he had only three months in public schools, Miner has gained such a practical education in the woods, watching and observing nature, that he was the unanimous choice to be guest speaker,” one reporter noted. The guest of honor was Herbert Hoover. Miner took home a $1,000 fee, plowing it back, as he did with most of his money, into the sanctuary.
To raise funds for his wildlife work, Miner often toured, giving public lectures and showing a pioneering movie, shot by a production crew sent by a Detroit admirer, Henry Ford, who himself often liked to slip across the border to Miner’s farm home after a tough day building cars, for a little country peace and quiet.
One night, according to family legend, Ford was awakened at 3 a.m. by a commotion caused by Miner and two sons rushing out of the house toward a pond.
“What’s up?” Ford asked. “A pack of wild dogs,” someone yelled back.
On his return to Detroit, Ford ordered workmen to install a chain-link fence around 35 acres of the Miner site. Sunk two feet deep to prevent burrowing by dogs, foxes or coyotes, it is still standing today. Later, Ford sent a tractor.
In 1914, according to another oft-told family story, Miner’s wife, Laona, received a calendar from a friend in the Salvation Army. As Miner noted, each day was tagged with a verse of Scripture.
“Hey,” he said, “why not put a little verse of Scripture on our leg bands?”
Ever since, despite government pleas for uniform international verbiage on leg bands for birds, Miner bands have carried a date, serial number, instructions to write to Jack Miner, Kingsville, Ont., Canada, plus a religious message, typically, “Have faith in God”-Mark 11:22.”
At the height of Miner’s fame, from the 1920s to the 1940s, captains of industry, the rich and the ordinary flocked to the goose sanctuary in Kingsville. Though some conservationists complained that Miner was more popularizer than scientist, Miner saw his work differently.
“If you are privileged to live in the country,” he once said, “you can make your home into a little earthly heaven by, as I deem it, assisting nature.”
To establish his landing zone as user-friendly, Miner first assured birds flying over that the field was safe by stationing geese, with clipped wings, on the grounds. Then, late each afternoon, he pulled out a flat-rack wagon, loaded with corn on the cob, to feed visitors an evening meal. To catch geese for banding, he rigged nets, 120 feet long, over a pond and dropped them on, well, sitting geese. The same process goes on today, much as Miner had begun it early in this century, though there have been some complaints about using traps to control bird-eating predators. Some activists see that as interfering with nature.
These days, about 150,000 people a year drive out to the sanctuary, about three-quarters of them coming in late October and early November. Tour buses line the road, though Kirk Miner urges drivers to shut off idling motors so that visitors can feel the event fully, an aural effect he describes as “a low echo that builds to a burst of noise, an inspiring sound.”
In an average season, about 300,000 geese will pass through, with 25,000 on the ground on a typical day at the height of migration. But this year, Cheryl Miner notes, the numbers of landings are off somewhat. The problem is not over-hunting, but other phenomena that have upset the balance of nature.
One is weather. In 1991 and 1992, freak snow storms in June covered goose nests in the southern James Bay area, wiping out goslings and leading to a devastating drop in population. Another problem is predators. Facing fewer hazards themselves, as fur has became politically incorrect for humans to wear, more foxes, coyotes and wolves are working the nesting grounds. They prey on goslings, who don’t learn to fly until 10 weeks old, and on their parents, who are flightless two weeks each summer while molting.
Yet, enough Canada geese are still making it south to keep up production standards for what one writer of 40 years ago, amazed at the Miner operation, called, “not just a bird show, but a real Air Bird Show.”
“What a picture to see these glittering bodies, not by the hundreds, but by the many, many thousands,” he went on. “A whole field of wild geese, right from the Arctic and Hudson Bay, at home and at ease, enjoying the autumn sun. They begin to move. They take to the air. You feel that if another rises it would not find room to fly. These birds fly right over the heads of the people gathered, then often light again in the same field. This is so stirring and vibrating, you will remember it for as long as you live.”
Before he died in 1944, Miner set up the Jack Miner Foundation (Box 32773, Detroit, Mich. 48232-0773) and an endowment fund to take care of his lands and buildings and to receive donations from those who shared his interests. President of the foundation these days is Jasper Miner, 83, last of Jack’s three sons. Jasper’s son, Kirk, 44, who spent 10 years as an accountant, came back to the sanctuary in the early 1980s and now handles the front office. His wife, Cheryl, handles tours. A fourth employee looks after maintenance.
“We welcome visitors to the grounds six days a week, but never on Sunday, though we have the air show across the road every day,” notes Kirk Miner.
The easiest way to get there, he said, is to take the Ambassador Bridge (marked “Bridge to Canada”) from Detroit. Procede along Ontario Highway 3 about 30 miles. Take the exit marked Division Road, toward Kingsville. Go three miles south to County Road 3 West. At the Sunoco station, make a right turn, then go one mile, and there it is.
Or, if you have two wings and are flying, watch for Lake Erie. Settle down about four miles short of the water’s edge. You’ll find ponds, free corn, barley, lots of feathered company. And if you need anything, just honk.
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The phone number of the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Foundation is 519-733-4034. The grounds and museum open at 9 a.m. every day of the year, except Sundays. The museum closes at 5 p.m. and the grounds at sundown. The fall migration peaks in November and the spring migration in April.
