[URBAN NOTE] The Toronto Islands, Again
Jul. 2nd, 2006 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldit was only when I when ransacking my archives that I discovered that I had last written about the Toronto Islands a year less two days before my Canada Day visit. This visit did nothing to convince me that the Islands are not, in fact, well-managed and nicely packaged. The manicured lawns and well-tended pavement roads of the Toronto Island Park definitely attracted a tourist population from the Toronto mainland at least a hundred times that of the Island's permanent population of several hundred. The Toronto Islands exist in their current form only because of tourism, as evidenced by the fact that the south shore of Ward's Island, facing Lake Ontario, is delimited by concrete and other breakwaters.
That said, there's still plenty of nature in the Islands. Moss and even some seedlings were growing on the surface of the conglomerate piers jutting south into Lake Ontario. Too, on the protected waterways of the Islands' interior, J. and I could see plenty of wildlife with nary a soul around: a mated pair of blue herons flying down the shallow waterways, swans, the cygnets looking bedraggled as the muscular adults honked their threat calls, families of mallards hugging the shores.
The Islands are artificial, but they're living nonetheless. This is a beautiful accomplishment that I rather like having the chance to appreciate. Imagine if, as I wrote in last year's post, that for whatever reason the Toronto Islands had been left to blur back into Lake Ontario. Something nice would have been lost; I'm glad it wasn't.
That said, there's still plenty of nature in the Islands. Moss and even some seedlings were growing on the surface of the conglomerate piers jutting south into Lake Ontario. Too, on the protected waterways of the Islands' interior, J. and I could see plenty of wildlife with nary a soul around: a mated pair of blue herons flying down the shallow waterways, swans, the cygnets looking bedraggled as the muscular adults honked their threat calls, families of mallards hugging the shores.
The Islands are artificial, but they're living nonetheless. This is a beautiful accomplishment that I rather like having the chance to appreciate. Imagine if, as I wrote in last year's post, that for whatever reason the Toronto Islands had been left to blur back into Lake Ontario. Something nice would have been lost; I'm glad it wasn't.
