When I first moved to Toronto for university 11 years ago, I wasn’t sure the city was for me.
I’d spent my high school years on the West Coast, where urban nature was a given. After class, my friends and I would stroll through a forest of towering evergreens to get to the beach, breathe in the salty air and watch the sun set over distant mountain peaks.
Toronto had nothing like that. I started to wonder if moving was a mistake.
In my first weeks here, I dragged myself to Trinity Bellwoods Park and felt deeply unimpressed. It was nothing but a lawn and some pathways with a couple of scattered trees. Pathetic, I remember thinking. A sign at the entrance declared Toronto a “city within a park.” I scoffed. With those puny trees and lack of scenic vistas? Yeah, right. You wish.
Turns out the problem was me. I had no idea how much natural wonder was right under my nose — or perhaps fluttering above my head, in the park and Toronto at large. All I had to do was look up.
I finally started doing that in 2020, when COVID lockdowns quieted the streets and left me with little to do but take long, meandering walks. First, I noticed the robins singing outside my window and the house sparrows hopping along the sidewalk. Then the turkey vultures circling overhead and the hawks perched in my local park.
Then, during the depths of a lonely COVID winter, my partner and I ventured to the waterfront and realized some of the fancy-looking black-and-white ducks we saw bobbing in the icy swells were different from the usual mallards. They were long-tailed ducks from the Arctic, and they’d been here every winter: they fly south to spend their winters on Lake Ontario.
The ducks were my “spark bird” — the term birdwatchers use to describe the first species that ignited their interest. I was hooked. I wondered how many other birds I’d been missing.
Turns out, a lot: sweet slate-coloured juncos flocking to bird feeders in my neighbourhood, nuthatches spiraling down trees head-first, mourning doves cooing from across the street. I soon found that even underwhelming neighbourhood parks can be filled with wings and feathers.
By then, I’d begrudgingly made peace with Toronto’s nature, accepting that it had its own lush, subtle beauty. But I suddenly felt like I was actually seeing that nature for the first time, like I’d been let in on a delicious secret. A whole new layer of the city had started to unfurl.
Trinity Bellwoods, once a disappointment, became one of my favourite places in the spring. Hundreds of bird species pass through Toronto on their way north, and above the slackliners and dog walkers and picnickers, the canopy I once dismissed comes alive. Warblers, vireos, and other tiny migrants flit from branch to branch, filling the air with colour and birdsong.
Birdwatching forces me to use my eyes in a way I hadn’t before, like tracing each contour of a tree for woodpecker holes or eyeing every detail of a songbird’s plumage to figure out exactly which species it might be. It also compels me to learn more about them: their natural rhythms, their habits, the ecosystems they rely on. I know to keep an eye out for red-winged blackbirds when I’m near water in the early spring, or to listen for cedar waxwings when I pass by a bush of ripe serviceberries.
The birds are a gateway to knowing the land Toronto sits on, and for me, to falling in love with it. Sure, it lacks mountains and the evergreens are tiny. But maybe this city isn’t so bad if all of these incredible creatures live here.
I used to dread Toronto’s dreary winters — but how could I feel that way now that I know scores of owls migrate here for the cold months, taking up snowy perches in our ravines?
I never spent much time at Moss Park, even when I lived nearby — but I adore it now that I’ve seen a cloud of chattering chimney swifts whirl into the giant smokestack there, a ritual they do during sunset in the late spring.
This magic was there all along, but now I actually know how to see it.
If you want to try birdwatching too, all you have to do is go to your nearest park, look up, and start listening. You’d be surprised how much beauty is there, just waiting to be noticed.
