Right now, the annual spring migration is bringing some of the loveliest birds in the world into Toronto and almost nobody pays attention but the cats. Millions of warblers and other songbirds that have been wintering in Central and South America pour, in a concentrated rush, literally right past our doors on their way to the boreal forests. For the next few weeks, gorgeous little yellow-rumped warblers and brown creepers and northern flickers and nearly 300 other species fill our gardens and parks.
The best place in the city to enjoy this spectacle is Tommy Thompson Park, a.k.a. the Leslie Street Spit. I think it is fair to say that it's the most attractive dump in the world, a taste of what the post-human world will be like. Among the detritus of huge concrete slabs, wildflowers bloom. Gulls play among shattered masses of marble. Coyotes stalk abandoned plastic chairs. This ignored bit of wasteland has been a boon to nature, particularly to birds: common terns, a species at risk in the rest of North America, are not endangered in Ontario, largely because of the Leslie Street Spit. It was the first official nesting site of the canvasback duck, with its strong, dusky, red head, in 2000. The place's ignored ugliness has paradoxically generated a home for beauty.
Birds pose an important question to the city of Toronto, a question that resonates far beyond the small world of bird watching: What are we going to do with beauty? Toronto has one of the strangest relationships to beauty of any contemporary city, and the birds are the clearest evidence of our confusion. All of the great buildings that have sprouted up in the past decade - the new Art Gallery of Ontario, the renovated Royal Conservatory of Music, the Ontario College of Art and Design slab - are startling exactly because they contrast the drabness of the city in which they find themselves. The Toronto that our ancestors bequeathed us is one of the ugliest major cities in the world. Before the new crop of architectural masterpieces, beauty was consistently on the margins here - buildings of historical import were destroyed, massive highways erected to bar citizens from the lake. The ignored birds are just the most obvious symptom of the city's indifference.
When I went this past weekend - a spring ritual for me - it was a coldish spring morning and only a handful of other birders were out. Brett Tryon and six volunteers for the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority were running a bird-banding operation with fifteen nets. The expertise of the banders, whose aim is to track bird migration patterns, is humbling to an amateur birder like me. Ms. Tryon can tell the fat content of a bird at a glance, and has memorized the moulting patterns of most of the birds she regularly captures so she can tell their age instantly. Seeing a brown creeper in Brett's delicate fingers was as close as anyone came to beauty that day in the city of Toronto - its small feathers in delicate symmetry, its curved beak perfectly evolved for wresting bugs from bark, its sharp, alien, oddly intelligent eyes. You can go any weekend and see the same thing.
Karen McDonald, a project manager for the Toronto Region Conservation Authority, proudly pointed out to me the "habitat restoration" currently under way. The TRCA has planted 6,000 trees over the past two years and will plant another 2,000 this year. Volunteers are building chimney-swift towers to encourage the declining numbers of swifts to breed on the Spit. They are building rafts to encourage more breeding common terns. Even as trucks carry urban trash to dump out in the middle of Lake Ontario, rare species of owls nest within sight of the CN Tower.
The park is divided literally between functionality and beauty: The north side belongs to the conservation authority and the south side belongs to the Ministry of Natural Resources. This contradiction can't last. The city is going to be faced with a stark choice in 2013, when the ministry's lease on the land expires. Are we going to continue as before, leaving beauty on the margins of the city and our consciousness, or are we going to turn the Leslie Street Spit into a proper city park? The latter might not be entirely a good thing, at least for the birds. If more people come, there will be less to see. "The real challenge isn't managing the wildlife or the habitat, but managing the people," Ms. McDonald tells me. We disturb the habitat every time we try to enjoy it.
The Leslie Street Spit cannot remain an accidental wilderness. Ignored landscapes do not survive. If we want to keep the birds, we're going to have to plan and fight to keep them. Even in Toronto, beauty can't stay lucky forever.
Special to The Globe and Mail