Bald Eagle – Photo by Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, I am off to Toronto in a few weeks to visit family and friends, so I was especially excited to read that a pair of Bald Eagles are nesting in the city for the first time in recorded history. This is very good news, implying that a) there are some big trees for them to nest in, and b) that there are sufficient fish stocks in Lake Ontario for them to feed on. The exact location of the nest is being kept a secret, and hopefully this will give the birds enough privacy to raise their chicks, though hiding a bird with a wingspan the size of a door will be a bit tricky. Fingers crossed!

I well remember seeing an osprey nest just a few miles outside Toronto when I was sitting on a train at Aldershot station on my way back from the Royal Botanical Gardens. I wonder if they nest there every year?

Although I have often been a bit curmudgeonly about how little green space there is in the very centre of Toronto, there is plenty of interesting habitat round about. The lakeshore area is over developed in my opinion, but you don’t have to go very far to see less built places. Recently, new floodplains and wetlands have been created around the mouth of the Don River, where the land had been previously heavily polluted by industry. The Don has also been prone to floods over previous years, so a new ‘man-made’ exit for the river to Lake Ontario hopes to alleviate some of these problems. The new marshland habitat could be very important for migrating birds and for other aquatic life.

The new river during regulated flooding

The new river mouth in normal times

And some creatures, such as this beaver filmed moving what appears to be a small tree towards its dam along by the harbourfront, will presumably be glad of a more convenient and conducive place to build its home. I’m very impressed by how respectful the people watching are, even the small children. Who would ever forget an encounter like this one? Though back in 2021 a beaver was spotted wandering around Royal York subway station (comments included ‘I recognised it from the back of a nickel’ and ‘at first I thought that someone had dropped a hat’. This one had probably come from the nearby Humber River, and was collected and dropped off back in the marshlands there.

Photo by Jenn Abbott.

And of course, we can’t leave the subject of Toronto without talking about the raccoons. The city is probably the raccoon capital of North America, and it’s fair to say that Torontonians have a grudging admiration for the animal. Everyone has a story – my husband’s late father told the tale of opening the garage door only to have a raccoon fall on his head. But my favourite is about the ‘raccoon-proof bins’ deployed by Mayor John Tory in 2017 (who is a Tory – nominative determinism if ever I saw it).

‘Raccoon-proof bins’ (photo from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/05/canada-toronto-raccoons)

Within days some raccoons had learned that they could open the bins by tipping them over so that the locks broke, and others had become adept at manipulating the lock itself. Well, these are very dextrous creatures, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. And, much like the foxes that we Londoners share our streets and gardens with, the raccoons were there first. We just need to learn to live with the wildlife.

Toronto raccoon (Photo by Terry Ozon from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)