Urban flyways

One sunny morning as summer was winding down, I stepped out my front door only to be stopped dead at the sight of a Cooper’s hawk on the sidewalk. It had a pigeon pinned against the pavement and was ripping apart its breast.

What struck me wasn’t the bloody brutality of the scene; hell, it was just nature. But it was nature happening outside my door and within spitting distance of the MacDonald bus line.

What I realized was that these birds, the pigeon and the hawk, a scavenger and a predator, are opportunists. They are constantly searching for habitat where there is food and shelter. That search brought them together in a space we inadvertently created.

That set of circumstances may be incidental to the way we live, but we are also engaging in deliberate activities to attract birds to our increasingly crowded landscape.

The noted B.C. naturalist Al Grass says as our own habitat becomes denser and more wired, we have become alienated by technology. As a result, we seek “the quiet and enduring things in nature.”

There is a small industry built around this search of ours that on the face of it serves no practical purpose. At Wild Birds Unlimited, a shop on Oak St. where Al sometimes works, customers pack out 20-pound sacks of black-oil sunflower seeds, along with cakes of suet, bags of peanuts and Niger seed by the gallon.

All of this is hauled home to fill designer bird feeders that stick to windows, hang from wall brackets, or perch on poles fitted with clever devices to foil squirrels and those scavenging pigeons, so that we can favour goldfinches, bushtits, pine siskins, downy woodpeckers, house finches and juncos. Much to the delight, by the way, of those Cooper’s hawks, which see the opportunity to pick off an hors d’oeuvre or two.

Beyond our yards and private pleasures, there is a collective effort too to reclaim nature within the city’s limits.

To the west there is Jericho Park, at 54 hectares, the second largest in Vancouver after Stanley Park. Before Europeans arrived, it was a tidal estuary fed by three streams and surrounded by old growth forest. The white guys first turned it into a naval reserve and logged it for ships’ masts and spars. Then it was a whaling station, then a golf course and later a military air base. Each use increasingly obliterated the natural topography and filled in existing waterways.

In the 1968 it became a city park and a long slow restoration began. Dawn Hanna runs the Jericho Park Stewardship Group. Along with a small army of volunteers, she spends her time ripping out invasive plant species, including English ivy and broom. Her pride and joy is a small knoll planted with native arbutus and Garry oak.

Today it is still a fragile thing. But there are ponds and a marsh. And more than 200 species of birds have been sighted.

On Vancouver’s eastern boundary, there’s an even newer and more precarious attempt to replicate what once was. It’s the greening of Hastings Park, which began eight years ago. Four hectares of pond and bush and pathways have replaced aged buildings and asphalt on the PNE site. It is called The Sanctuary.

Early summer mornings a kingfisher’s rattling staccato call drowns out traffic, and a great blue heron hunts on the pond’s bank. For all the political turmoil that surrounded its creation, it is a remarkable success. It is a feeding and nesting site for resident birds, and a perfect migration trap for subtropical birds making their way up and down the Pacific coast.

Last May it was Al Grass who first heard, and then spotted a male black-headed grosbeak, the 100th species to visit The Sanctuary. A few months later, Al and I stood in that small space, oblivious to the cars on Hastings St., only aware of the dragonflies and dabbling ducks and the cattails going to seed.

And thinking how, in spite of the increasing crush of human activity in our city, we could still succeed in finding the quiet and enduring things in nature.

Allen Garr is a Vancouver journalist and commentator who has made time for his passions: birding, gardening and beekeeping.