Doris Huestis Speirs

Doris Louise Huestis Speirs (née, Huestis; also known as Doris Huestis Mills; 7 October 1894 – 24 October 1989) was a Canadian ornithologist, artist and poet. The "Doris Huestis Speirs Award" is an annual prize bestowed by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists to "an individual who has made outstanding lifetime contributions in Canadian ornithology". At the age of 17, she traveled through Europe with her music teacher, visiting art galleries and collecting sepia prints. An amateur who was among the earliest Canadian painters to experiment in an abstract mode,

Speirs belonged to a small group of freelance painters, mostly untrained, who received encouragement from the Group. She influenced two of her friends, Bess Larkin Housser (later Harris' wife) and Marjorie Meredith, and a sister, Marion Miller, to paint as well, each reaching a certain degree of success with their art.

In the 1920s, Speirs began to purchase art work. As early as 1924, It was willed to the Art Gallery of Ontario upon Speirs' death. She was a founding member of the Margaret Morse Nice Ornithological Club and the Pickering Naturalists' Club. For her work as a prominent contributor to ornithological literature on the evening grosbeak and Lincoln's sparrow, the Society of Canadian Ornithologists bestow the annual "Doris Huestis Speirs Award" in her honor. Exercise for Psyche, the collection of Speirs' poems dating from 1922 to 1972, was published in 1973. She married firstly W. Gordon Mills (died 1916), an executive with Eaton's, who was also a poet, art critic and elected member of the Art Gallery of Toronto. She met J. Murray Speirs while he was in graduate school studying ornithology; they married in 1939, and he subsequently became a professor of zoology at the University of Toronto. Speirs had two children. She died in Ajax, Ontario in 1989.