OTTAWA
With Canada’s 150th anniversary looming next year, a gap was noticed in the country’s roster of patriotic icons. It had a national anthem, a national tree, two national animals, two national sports — but no national bird.
That would not do. The United States has the bald eagle, Mexico the golden eagle, France the rooster. Down in El Salvador they have the turquoise-browed motmot. But Canada, one of the world’s major bird habitats, had gone a century and a half without ever choosing an avian avatar.
Why? The Department of Canadian Heritage, the official government keeper of symbols, could not explain it. Neither could ornithologists, nor the editor of Canadian Geographic magazine, Aaron Kylie.
So the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, which publishes the magazine and perhaps saw a chance for some nice publicity, took up the two-year task of selecting one.
And boy, did it ruffle feathers.
To get the public involved, the society set up a website where Canadians could vote for their favourite bird — but it did not promise to heed the result. (Nobody wanted something like the “Boaty McBoatface” online ship-naming debacle.) Instead, a panel of experts was given the final say.
Prominent Canadian writers championed their favourites in the magazine’s pages, and the contest became a popular topic on (of course) Twitter under the hashtag #CanadaBird. The society even staged a public debate in September, with naturalists and Canada’s poet laureate, George Elliott Clarke, each backing a species.
And then came the big reveal. The proposed Canadian national bird would be the grey jay.
The what?
It’s a fluffy songbird found in all 13 of Canada’s provinces and territories, which is a plus. But it tends to stick to the deep northern woods, and isn’t often seen as far south as the strip of land along the American border where most Canadians live. To them, the grey jay is a stranger.
David Bird, a professor emeritus of wildlife biology and an ornithologist at McGill University in Montreal, was the bird’s booster in the debate. In an interview, Bird gave a long list of reasons. For example, he said that instead of migrating, the grey jay stays in Canada and nests through the winter, feeding on frozen food that it stashed away in the fall under the loose bark of spruce trees. Mating pairs are monogamous, he said, unlike many other species. And grey jays like people when they meet them, alighting on their clothing or hands in the hope of a snack.
“You’ve got loyal, you’ve got friendly, you’ve got smart, you’ve got hearty: That’s what Canadians think we are,” Bird said.
What you haven’t got is huge popularity. When about 50,000 people voted in the magazine’s online poll, the grey jay finished third, behind the loon, which adorns Canada’s one-dollar coin, and the snowy owl.
“I know a lot of Canadians didn’t know what the grey jay was, and were asking: ‘Do I see it in my feeder?’” Bird said. “And there are still people angry because they felt the popular vote was not honoured.”
Kylie, the editor of Canadian Geographic, said that the loon and snowy owl were excluded from final consideration because they were already used as symbols by the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
He said the relative unfamiliarity of the grey jay, also known as the whiskey jack, weighed on the plus side, not the minus. “We have an animal symbol, which is the beaver,” he said by way of analogy. “I would say that most Canadians don’t see a beaver in a given year. The fact that some Canadians don’t know this bird, I think, is all the more reason to have it proclaimed the national bird.”
Then you have the spelling of the bird’s names. Following the usual Canadian style, it ought to be called the grey jay, with an e, or the whisky jack, without one. The “grey” and “whiskey” spellings are seen (and resented) as Americanisms.
However you spell it, the magazine’s proposal has met with a cool reception from officialdom.
“At this time, the government of Canada is not actively considering proposals to adopt a bird as a national symbol,” Pierre-Olivier Herbert, the press secretary for Melanie Joly, the heritage minister, wrote in an email.
Even so, Bird is among those now pushing to get a grey jay bill through Parliament somehow. And he expressed relief that another bird associated with Canada was never a real contender.
“Canada goose? Over my dead body,” he said. “They’re basically pooping machines, and they’re obnoxious. If we had picked that bird, we would be getting a lot more outrage than we have now. ”
