A force of nature

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This article was published 23/06/2018 (2702 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

She was an environmentalist and an influential teacher whose legacy will long be enjoyed by future generations of Manitobans.

Jennifer Shay, a professor of botany at the University of Manitoba for 35 years, died May 7, 2018, in Kingston-upon-Hull, England, of complications from Parkinson’s disease. She was 88.

“It was largely through her hard work that the University of Manitoba’s Delta Marsh Field Station was established in 1966,” said U of M biology Prof. Gordon Goldsborough.

“Without that facility, and the profound field experience that I had there, it’s doubtful I would have ended up in the career that I did.”

Shay saw the absence of fieldwork as a serious flaw in the education of U of M students. She became the founding director of the Delta Marsh Field Station, after the school acquired the former estate of Donald Bain, and ran it for two decades.

She was literally the chief cook and bottle-washer, often cooking meals, making beds, and whatever else she had to do to keep the field station going. It operated for 45 years until its closure in 2011.

She was also a founding member of the Manitoba Museum, belonged to the board of Fort Whyte Nature Centre and assisted in the creation of the Living Prairie Museum in Winnipeg. She was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1989 and an Officer in 2001.

As well, she and husband Tom Shay, a U of M anthropologist, turned their 17-acre parcel of land south of St. Adolphe into a nature reserve supporting river-bottom forest. That was after they lost their home on the parcel in the devastating 1997 flood. Called the Jennifer and Tom Shay Ecological Reserve, it became part of the province’s ecological reserves program in 2004 and protects more than 150 plant and 180 bird species.

“Sit up! Shoulders back!” was how husband Tom described Shay’s essence.

It was a measure of her spirit that when she contracted Parkinson’s, she managed to see a silver lining.

“I am glad I got Parkinson’s now. If I had the disease years ago, I would not have been able to do the things I did,” she told her husband.

Shay was born to Frank and Kathleen Walker in Hull, England, on March 27, 1930. She graduated with a bachelor of science in biology from London University in 1952 and worked at Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre in Suffolk, where she was the first female staff member.

She left for Canada in 1957 to take a position as a research assistant, and earned her master’s and PhD in botany, performing pioneering research on the recovery of plants following catastrophic flooding. For most of her time at U of M, she was the only female professor in biological sciences.

She joined the Manitoba Naturalist Society (now Nature Manitoba) almost immediately upon her arrival in the province.

Ardythe McMaster, in a 1993 tribute recorded in the naturalist society’s newsletter, described Shay’s arrival “like a gust or a whirlwind.” By 1960, she was vice-president of the association and became president in 1963.

“I wonder how many workshops Jennifer has led, introducing Manitobans to winter twigs and buds? Or prairie flora? Or marshland ecology? Or prairie soils before and after the plough?” McMaster wrote.

“How many times over the last 36 years has she been the guest speaker? How many Manitobans’ lives have been touched, as mine has been, by this energetic and enthusiastic woman who inspires us all to get out into the field where the action is and learn?”

Upon her retirement from the U of M in 1993, friends and colleagues established a bursary fund in her name to stimulate undergraduate field studies in botany and ecology.

With her at the helm until 1986, more than 6,000 students participated in field programs at the Delta Marsh Field Station. There were 37 graduate theses and 167 published scientific papers based on work there.

“Whether they were studying the impacts of flooding on the marsh vegetation, or learning winter survival skills building quinzhees or igloos, the many students who experienced the marsh through the field station left with unforgettable memories of their time sharing, learning and eating (!) at Delta,” wrote Diane Kunec, one of Shay’s graduate students, in a tribute.

“There is no one like her,” Kunec said in an a recent email exchange. “She was a force of nature and a loving mother wrapped up as one. And she was just great fun to be with in the field, where learning was always an adventure.”

At a family gathering in the summer of 2010 during a game of cricket, Shay, just having turned 80, “was able to smash sixes one after the other, earning her the title of the Silver Fox,” said her niece, Angela James, at Shay’s funeral service. She was “an inspiring teacher, mothered us all and saw each of our unique talents and helped us to realize them.”

Shay returned to the United Kingdom with her husband in 2005, and immediately took up participation with many organizations and boards, including the British Ecological Society — the largest of its kind in Europe — and the Beverley Arts Society, which she chaired. She received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.

A service to celebrate her life was held May 25, at St. Helen’s Church, in the Parish of Welton, in Yorkshire, England.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca