Spring has sprung - From the 416 to the 905

Cute alert!

This is what my brother-in-law Rob found under a pile of leaves in his Markham backyard. Actually, when he first found them they looked like little pink balls - eyes shut, ears pinned back - but a week later, they are full on, cute-as-a-bunny bunnies.

Rob was worried that he’d disturbed their nest, which was up against his townhouse wall beside the garden hose. But it turns out that mother rabbits only return once or twice a day to quickly nurse and then scoot off so as not to call attention to them. She’s doing a good job - two weeks later, Rob’s bearded collie Hoover has yet to notice the nest right outside his door. I don’t know what’s funnier - the idea of a great big dog taking a whiz five feet from the nest, or his great big master scouring the internet for bunny care tips.

I don’t think of Markham as much of a wild kingdom, but you can catch the birds and bees doing their thing right downtown at this time of year. My perennial favourite is at this pond outside Roy Thompson Hall:

If you pass through the walkway seen at bottom right, you’ll see a family of ducklings learning to swim right beside the glass.

They’ve been returning here for seven years now, despite efforts to discourage them - at various points, staff have fenced in the pillars where they built their nests, removed the pillars entirely, and asked wildlife experts to relocate them to more appropriate grounds - all without luck. So now, they’ve put out a ramp and a bowl of food, and you can watch them do their ducky thing any business day.

Even more fun is watching the business people watching the ducks, and cooing and making those “Awwwww! Nature!” faces so out of place in the city’s business hub. Like Rob, they sometimes go back to their office computers to look up duck nesting habits.

I know this because I’ve encouraged it in the past. In June 2000, my sister Alison wrote a feature on these very ducks for the CBC4Kids website. You can still find it online via Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. It included a Duck Journal on how the little ducklings grew, and a feature on duck nesting habits.

Those of you reading from rural locations will likely - and should - scoff at the urban fascination with any remnant of the natural world. But I still think it’s a tiny miracle, and how many of those do you see at work?

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 05-21-2007 | 12:05 AM
Posted in: Toronto