What the Spit Keeps

Tommy Thompson Park was never meant to be a park. It was meant to be a wall.

For decades Toronto pushed its rubble into Lake Ontario here, Victorian brick, dredged harbour silt, the crushed walls of buildings nobody wanted, until the pile stood as a five-kilometre arm of land where there had been open water. Concrete, rubble, a few tough weeds. Nobody drew up a park.

The birds came anyway, tens of thousands every spring and fall. The beavers came. The cormorants arrived in 1990 and would not leave. A place made entirely of what a city threw away turned into one of the busiest wildlife stopovers on the Great Lakes.

Nobody planted any of it.

Here are eight of the lives on that peninsula, dated as I found them.

October 2. American beaver. By October it is packing a pantry it will never see. The beaver does not hibernate. It cuts branches, drags them down into the pond, and anchors them in the mud, so that when the surface closes over with ice it will still have something to eat under there.

October 3. Eastern red bat. A tree bat that roosts in the open, hanging by one foot under the leaves, looking like nothing so much as a dead leaf. It can afford to. The membrane between its tail and its legs is furred, so it can wrap its own tail around itself like a blanket, wait out the cold in plain sight, or give up and fly south. Endangered in Ontario.

October 4. Double-crested cormorant. The largest known colony of this bird in North America nests on a single peninsula here. The birds kill the trees they nest in, stripping the leaves for nest material and painting the trunks with guano until the cottonwoods die standing. Rather than shoot them, the park hazes them down onto the ground. Fifteen years of that, and about ninety percent now nest on bare ground, up from fifteen.

October 5. North American river otter. Gone from Toronto by the start of the twentieth century, gone from the harbour and then from memory. Nobody brought it back. It walked back through the water on its own, first sign in 2012 at the edge of the city limits, on the Spit since 2019, first one animal, now family groups.

October 6. Monarch butterfly. By October the monarchs here are not residents, they are passers-through, and the peninsula is a place to gather before the last leg. This generation will live about eight months where its parents lived four weeks. It stores fat, delays mating, and flies a route none of its line has ever flown.

October 7. Blackpoll warbler. Twelve grams, small enough to close a hand around. Before it leaves for South America it nearly doubles that weight, then flies almost 2,800 kilometres out over open Atlantic water without stopping to eat or drink. Up to three days. Under it, nothing but ocean. It comes through the Spit on the way, one of the warblers the bird research station here bands each fall.

October 8. Eastern coyote. It dens in the rubble. The broken concrete the park is made of is also where it makes its home: a naturalist who walks the peninsula several times a week once found that a pair had dug a den under a heap of concrete slabs, six pups asleep in the sun outside it. Coyotes were first seen here in 1993, near the lighthouse at the farthest point, and their howls are still heard out there at night. Nobody brought them either. The eastern coyote runs about ten pounds heavier than its western cousin, and the man who has watched this park’s mammals for twenty-five years leaves the wolf question alone, as too complicated to settle in a paragraph. I will too.

October 9. Eastern cottonwood. The forest on the Spit is dominated by poplars, and it is the most mature community on the whole peninsula, and still young, because the Spit itself is less than fifty years old. The first cottonwoods here were not planted. Their seed was light-tufted, and it came on the wind from the Toronto Islands, across the water. Nobody set a tree in the ground. The wind did, onto bare rubble. And these are the same cottonwoods the cormorants strip and kill.

The Spit has no street view. No camera car ever drove that peninsula. It exists in the animals that found it on their own, and in the people who have walked it.

Sources: Tommy Thompson Park / TRCA (park-species/trees-shrubs; Double-crested Cormorant Management Report); Edward O’Connor, “Mammals of the Leslie Street Spit”; bioGraphic, “A Wild Home on the Bones of the City”; Philip Jessup, “The Leslie Street Spit”; High Park Nature Centre; Beach Metro Community News; US Fish and Wildlife Service; US National Park Service, Blackpoll Warbler Migration; Audubon Field Guide; Tommy Thompson Park Bird Research Station fall migration monitoring; CBC Nature of Things.

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