The region has changed considerably since the federal government established the Victoria Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary — first migratory bird sanctuary in the Victoria area — 100 years ago.
In 1923, any bird that stopped along the southern tip of 91原创 Island every fall en route from Arctic breeding grounds to warmer, southern wintering territories would have seen green space — more trees, more fields and more farms.
A trumpeter swan, northern pintail, red knot, or other migrating species would have had to deal with fewer people. Only about 100,000 people lived in the Victoria area at that time, with commensurably fewer houses, paved patios, roads, parking lots and shopping centres.
However, the birds would have encountered more bullets.
The tasty black brant goose was a particularly popular target. Huge numbers of this small sea goose once wintered along the region’s beaches and coastal flatlands, feeding on nearshore seaweed and eel grass.
As such, the bird presented a low-cost alternative for Christmas dinner, and commercial hunting to meet the seasonal goose-meat demand took a toll. Today, only a few brant spend the colder months on B.C.’s coast — and almost none on the south Island.
A desire to rein in the commercial hunting of brant geese and other birds led to the creation of the Victoria Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary on Oct. 27, 1923.
Stretching from Ten-Mile Point in Saanich to Macaulay Point in Esquimalt, the sanctuary includes all lands below the high-water mark along the shore. It also includes everything below the high water around Trial Island and throughout all of Victoria Harbour, including up the Gorge and around Portage Inlet.
Four years later, the federal government established another two similar sanctuaries in the region — Shoal Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary in North Saanich and Sidney in April 1931 and Esquimalt Lagoon Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Colwood in December 1931.
Thanks to our geography — the curve of the North American coast, the surrounding water, the world’s widest ocean on our starboard side (if we face south), the Island is a key stopover on the 91原创 Flyway, a north-south migratory bird highway. Millions of birds travel the flyway twice each year.
The sanctuaries are testament to the foresight of early 20th-century policy makers and 91原创 naturalists.
Canada (or Great Britain, which had jurisdiction over Canada’s international agreements at that time) had signed the Migratory Bird Convention with the United States only in 1916.
Intended to regulate bird harvesting and to assure the preservation of the continent’s bird species, it was one of the first international treaties on wildlife conservation.
Laws implementing the convention in Canada in 1917 protected migrating birds — the pretty ones, the boring-looking ones, the tasty ones, the big ones, the tiny ones and so on — as well as their eggs and nests for the birds’ nutritional, social, cultural, spiritual, ecological, economic and esthetic value.
That the government created three migratory sanctuaries so close to each other also recognizes the region’s importance to migrating birds. Although originally established to control hunting, the three bird sanctuaries provide essential habitat for many species of wintering, migrating, nesting, summering and moulting birds.
In the decades since, that habitat has become ever more critical, as more and more of the area’s forests were harvested, its meadows, fields and farmland were paved and developed, and its shorelines turned over to industry, rich people’s housing, and heavily used recreation areas.
Of course, the sanctuaries have their limits. The high-tide boundaries create confusion and uncertainty among us humans about where our dogs are allowed to run free on which local beaches. (Section 5 and Part IX of the address those questions clearly. The maps provided in these CRD publications provide further clarity: .)
In addition, the federal sanctuaries were never intended to help migrating grassland-nesting birds, forest birds or birds that don’t rely on the tidal zone, which face equally concerning habitat losses throughout the region. Those species need other measures for protection.
But within their limitations, the sanctuaries do provide sanctuary.
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