Glen Hvenegaard, Jeremy Mouat, and Heather J. Marshall. Frank Farley and the Birds of Alberta. (Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 2025).

Frank Farley and the Birds of Alberta chronicles the life of a passionate naturalist. Frank Farley (1870-1949) made notable contributions as an ornithologist, reflecting his keen interest in the natural world, his close friendship with leading ornithologists, and his commitment to citizen science and environmental education.

The eldest son of a well-off family in St. Thomas, Ontario, Farley’s early bird studies reflected his friendship with two of Canada’s leading ornithologists, Will Saunders and Thomas McIlwraith. Likely as a result of their encouragement, as a teenager he began to publish his observations as well as to assemble an impressive collection of books and journals. His good friend Percy Taverner, Chief Ornithologist for the National Museum of Canada, later described Farley’s library as “a valuable addition to the bird literature of the west.”¹

Although he initially found work as a banker in southern Ontario, Farley opted to move west, filing for a homestead near Red Deer, Alberta. He had just turned twenty-two. He had not abandoned his interest in birds, however, having advertised for a copy of Coues’ Key to North American Birds just as he moved west. Written by renowned American ornithologist Elliott Coues—hence the shorthand title, “Coues’ Key”—the book was indispensable for those who wanted to situate their own observations and conclusions within the broader conceptual framework then emerging.

The sub-title of Coues’ book referred to “the New Nomenclature of the American Ornithologists’ Union [AOU],” reflecting a growing consensus concerning the most appropriate method to classify birds. The AOU’s method was based on the system developed more than a hundred years earlier by the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus. Farley’s desire to purchase Coues’ book just as he was heading west meant that he was taking with him, literally and symbolically, the standard methods of ornithology then emerging.

Like other naturalists intent on describing, classifying, and eventually conserving the birds of western Canada, Farley’s views were firmly grounded in European understandings of the natural world. This approach reflected the process of settler colonization then underway, a process that largely ignored the authority of First Nations’ traditional knowledge and asserted in its place that of the European colonizer. Farley’s life may be a local story grounded in east central Alberta, but it is also embedded in the complex issues of the western Canadian past.

“Farley’s life may be a local story grounded in east central Alberta, but it is also embedded in the complex issues of the western Canadian past.”

Farley entered his homestead less than a month after arriving in Red Deer. His was one of just over four hundred homestead entries made at Red Deer in 1892. He spent the spring and summer engaged in the hard work of homesteading. By mid-autumn, he was ready for the first winter in his new home. The cold weather arrived in spectacular fashion, when Farley witnessed a remarkable flight of snow geese. “Towards evening on the 14th [of October 1892],” he wrote,

a sudden cold wave swept out of the north, accompanied by heavy snow and wind of blizzard proportions, the first sign of winter. I had just finished building a cabin on my homestead ten miles south-east of Red Deer, and was preparing for my first winter in Alberta. Before dark, flock after flock of white geese appeared in the sky coming from the north, heading due south, and flying with terrific speed in their attempt to get ahead of the winter’s first icy blast. Tens of thousands of geese passed over in the first hour or two, while throughout the night the mad rush continued unabated. There was never a moment during the darkness when the babel of noise could not be heard. In the morning a wonderful sight met my view as I looked out over the snow-covered valley and watched the flocks, so close together that they touched and in many cases overlapped. Several lines of V shaped flocks could always be seen over a width of a mile or more, and the noise was almost deafening as an enormous assemblage swung low, barely a hundred feet above the cabin’s roof. Although snow fell constantly during the entire twenty-four hours, and vision was at times limited, the geese never appeared to lose their bearings. Thousands were always in sight during the day of the 15th, and it seemed as though all the “wavies” on the continent were rushing south through this very restricted area, probably less than five miles in width. The flight continued until darkness set in on the 15th, and it ended just as abruptly as it began. . .²

The passage gives a sense not only of the remarkable sight and sound of the birds flying overhead but also of the young man below, watching in wonder. The vivid prose suggests someone with a keen appreciation of their surroundings.

Farley was a well-known Canadian ornithologist active during the first half of the twentieth century. He is now chiefly remembered in Camrose, in east central Alberta. In the 1920s through to the 1940s, he was widely regarded as “one of the foremost naturalists in Alberta.”³ Aside from his many notes and reports in leading ornithology journals of the day, his most significant publication was the booklet Birds of the Battle River Region (1932). Years later, when the first edition of The Birds of Alberta appeared in 1958, the book’s authors dedicated it to Farley, “for whom it is intended to serve as a memorial and as a tribute to his great contributions to the appreciation of birds and nature in Alberta.”⁴

Farley’s early years as a homesteader were similar to those of other settler colonists who came to western Canada during the late nineteenth century. Farley soon began the necessary improvements to gain title to the land, which included clearing, fencing, erecting buildings, and so on. But this does not tell the whole story, of course. Farley’s arrival in the region came as the federal government was proceeding with its plan to incorporate the west into Canada, as the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 made clear. The following year the federal government further enhanced its authority in the West by creating the North-West Mounted Police (forerunner of today’s RCMP), which was sent to the region to assert and maintain Canadian sovereignty. Then in 1876 the federal government passed the Indian Act, specifically prohibiting those who it defined as “Indians” from having the right to homestead.⁵ As another has argued, these official acts were intended “To introduce private property, to dispossess Aboriginal people of their land, to dominate and colonize.”⁶ Needless to say, Farley and the other settler colonists coming west faced no such restrictions.

The Dominion Lands Act came just ten years after the passage of the Homestead Act in the USA, which it resembled and whose purpose was broadly similar. As American historian, Patricia Nelson Limerick, suggested in her aptly-named book, The Legacy of Conquest,

Western history is a story structured by the drawing of lines and the marking of borders … an effort first to draw lines dividing the West into manageable units of property and then to persuade people to treat those lines with respect … This relationship to physical matter seems to us so commonplace that we must struggle to avoid taking it for granted, to grasp instead the vastness of the continent and the enormous project of measuring, allocating, and record keeping involved in turning the open expanses of North America into transferable parcels of real estate. Like the settlers themselves, we steadfastly believe in the social fiction that lines on a map and signatures on a deed legitimately divide the earth.⁷

These comments apply both to the Canadian and the American wests. Farley’s life in western Canada was deeply implicated in the process of colonization and dispossession then underway, benefitting from what another has described as “the political economy of plunder.”

If Farley was but one of many settler colonists then moving into the region, his life and career did not mirror the pattern of settler colonization then being imposed upon the western landscape.  Few other settlers could have written that passage describing the birds flying overhead, nor could they have matched his knowledge of birds or his sensitivity to the natural world.

Farley and others did not travel alone. They brought with them familiar social arrangements and institutions, notably banks, churches, and political parties. However obvious the point, it bears repeating that the colonization of western Canada “took place within a framework defined by national institutions: the Crown, corporations, and churches.”⁸ With most First Nations confined to reserves, settler colonists saw western Canada as a “new” land, a common contemporary description. This should not obscure what the federal government’s settlement policy aimed to achieve. It was “to erase First Nations from the landscape outside of reserves, confine them to those reserves, and replace them with an army of homesteaders.” As another scholar has noted, “the Aboriginal presence was removed, transforming Canada from a place long inhabited to an unoccupied frontier awaiting colonization and the imposition of a new economic and moral order.”⁹

The Camrose Canadian’s editorial after Farley’s death in 1949 claimed that his footprints would be “hard to wash out from the sands of time.”¹⁰ Seventy years after his death, Farley is less well-remembered. Despite this fading memory, the work that Farley began, or in which he participated, continues. Miquelon Lake, now a provincial park, has become home to the Augustana Miquelon Lake Research Station and the Hesje Observatory, owned by the University of Alberta. The station promotes research, enhances teaching, and develops community partnerships to demonstrate sustainable practices. Young people continue to learn something of the natural world in all its complexity at Miquelon Lake, a project first initiated by Farley. His contributions to Miquelon Lake Provincial Park as Game Officer in the 1920s are commemorated by signage near the entrance of the park. In 2018, a winter skating track through the park was named the Farley Freezeway.

Other places and projects in which Farley played a role have also survived. His Camrose house still stands on 49th Street, the Camrose and District Museum that he founded remains open, and the City of Camrose now employs a Greenspace and Wildlife Stewardship Coordinator, whose duties include assisting residents wanting to care for Purple Martin nesting boxes. Farley also encouraged and mentored many young people over his lifetime, some of whom went on to distinguished careers in science, nature studies, and writing. One famous protégé was his grand-nephew, Farley Mowat, one of Canada’s most well-known authors.

Further afield, Beaverhill Lake, a favoured birding place for both William Rowan (renowned University of Alberta zoologist) and Farley, now boasts the Beaverhill Bird Observatory, established in 1984 as a formal migration monitoring observatory. In 1997, the lake itself was designated an Important Bird Area of Global Significance; there are also a few provincial protected areas surrounding the lake. Just to the west of the lake are the Beaver Hills. This region, with its distinctive “knob and kettle” terrain, became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in March 2016, joining “a global network of over 700 sites that are internationally recognized for their work to ensure ecologically sustainable human and economic development.”¹¹ Miquelon Lake Provincial Park lies within the boundaries of the Beaver Hills Biosphere, and the Beaver Hills Biosphere Reserve Association “stewards the Biosphere and supports partners working together for a sustainable region, through shared initiatives and collaborative action.”¹²

Farley’s work at Miquelon Lake was a consequence of the Migratory Birds Treaty. A century later, the need to protect North America’s Flyways remains a crucial project. The Boreal Songbird Initiative, which describes itself as “a non-profit organization dedicated to education and outreach about the importance of the North American Boreal Forest to birds, other wildlife, and the global environment”, is committed to this work. Its campaign to protect Canada’s northern boreal forests and the “bird nurseries” that they provide is impressive, but it is only the most recent in a more than century-old effort to protect the continent’s migratory birds.¹³ Farley’s earlier contributions to bird banding studies helped others to understand the broader patterns of migratory routes across the continent.

Farley’s range of interests seem close to our own. He sought to understand the human impact on the natural world, especially the impact of European settlement and colonization on western Canada. Consider, for example, an article that he wrote for the Edmonton Journal in 1928, speculating about the fate of the increasingly scarce Whooping Crane. Farley raised the possibility that settlement was responsible: “Could it be (he wrote) that the settlement of the prairies has driven this majestic bird into the remote parts of the north, there to raise their young away from the haunts of man?”¹⁴ Although it is impossible to know the impact of such articles, the fact that he wrote them at all is noteworthy.

Farley lived in another time, of course. The province had begun to change fundamentally by the time of his death in 1949. The catalyst for this change was the oil boom that followed the 1947 strike in Leduc. The provincial government gradually came to appreciate that resource extraction would bring windfall profits, compensating for its inability to enact its “Social Credit” legislation. If the hard years of the Depression had scarred many in the province, the new oil economy now beckoned with ample employment opportunities, few barriers to entry, and good wages.

“For all its differences from our own, his world was also marked by serious and very public environmental challenges, underscored by the growing number of species extinctions and population declines. Farley’s work forms part of a long struggle to ensure a sustainable future for this fragile planet.”

This seems a very different world than the one in which Farley lived. One has to make an effort to look back beyond post-war Alberta and the long reign of the Social Credit government, to appreciate the context of an earlier time, the period during which Farley lived and worked. For all its differences from our own, his world was also marked by serious and very public environmental challenges, underscored by the growing number of species extinctions and population declines. Farley’s work forms part of a long struggle to ensure a sustainable future for this fragile planet. The steps he took are instructive: drawing the public’s attention to the world of birds in popular newspaper articles, acting as an intermediary between specialists and the general public, advocating for environmental education in the school curriculum, and encouraging others to accompany him into, and care for, the natural world.

Another has argued that Alberta’s early history of progressive activism “urgently needs to be recalled and rekindled.” He is right. We face pressing environmental challenges, ones that will not be easily overcome. Confronting this future, we might take inspiration from those who have gone before. We might follow in Frank Farley’s footprints.

Frank Farley and the Birds of Alberta is the recipient of a 2026 Alberta Wildlife Publication Award from the Alberta Chapter of The Wildlife Society.

Notes

1. P.A.T., “Book Reviews, Birds of the Battle River Region of Central Alberta by Frank L. Farley,” Canadian Field-Naturalist 47, 8 (November 1933), 159. ↩︎
2. Frank L. Farley, “Lesser Snow Goose,” in Birds of the Battle River Region: With notes on their present status, migrations, food habits and economic value (Edmonton: Institute of Applied Art, 1932), 17-18. ↩︎
3. Wetaskiwin Times, 17 August 1930, 6.  The comment came in an article describing how Farley became president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association by acclamation. ↩︎
4. W. Ray Salt and A. L. Wilk, The Birds of Alberta (Edmonton: Queen’s Printer, 1958). ↩︎
5. The prohibition on First Nations acquiring land by homesteading was unequivocal: “No Indian or non-treaty Indian, resident in the province of Manitoba, the North-West Territories [which included the territory that would become the province of Alberta] or the territory of Keewatin, shall be held capable of having acquired or acquiring a homestead or pre-emption right to a quarter section, or any portion of land in any surveyed or unsurveyed lands in the said province of Manitoba, the North-West Territories or the territory of Keewatin, or the right to share in the distribution of any lands allotted to halfbreeds. . .” Section 70, An Act to amend and consolidate the laws respecting Indians (Assented to 12 April, 1876). ↩︎
6. Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 82. ↩︎
7. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), 55.  See also Michael John Witgen’s Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022).  Numerous Canadian scholars have also addressed this issue.  See for example James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina, SK.: University of Regina Press, 2013), which according to google scholar has been cited more than a thousand times. ↩︎
8. John C. Lehr and Yossi Katz, “Crown, corporation and church: the role of institutions in the stability of pioneer settlements in the Canadian West, 1870-1914,” Journal of Historical Geography 21, 4 (October 1995): 425.  Cf. Deryck W. Holdsworth and John C. Everitt, “Bank Branches and Elevators: Expressions of Big Corporations in Small Prairie Towns,” Prairie Forum 13, 2 (Fall 1988): 173-90. ↩︎
9. Sarah Carter, “Erasing and Replacing: Property and Homestead Rights of First Nations Farmers of Manitoba and the Northwest, 1870s-1910s,” in Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton, eds., Essays on Western Canada: Place and Replace (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2013), 35; Stephen Bocking, “The Background of Biodiversity: A Brief History of Canadians and Their Living Environment,” in Stephen Bocking, ed., Biodiversity in Canada: Ecology, Ideas, and Action (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 12. ↩︎
10. “The Editor’s Sounding Board,” Camrose Canadian, 26 October 1949, 2. ↩︎
11. For a full account of the Beaver Hills Initiative, see http://www.beaverhills.ca/ ↩︎
12. The quotation is from their web page, https://www.beaverhills.ca/about/the-association ↩︎
13. For detail on the Boreal Songbird Initiative, see http://www.borealbirds.org/ ↩︎
14. Frank L. Farley, “Almost Like the Dodo,” Edmonton Journal, 31 January 1928, 4. ↩︎

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Jeremy Mouat, Glen Hvenegaard, and Heather Marshall

JEREMY MOUAT is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and an environmental historian. | GLEN HVENEGAARD is a Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Alberta's Augustana Campus in Camrose. | HEATHER MARSHALL is a freelance writer and graphic designer, based in Camrose, and working for the North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance.

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