Tommy Thompson Park

This guide to Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto starts with a 1990 count of just six cormorant nesting pairs on this man-made spit, and traces how the land itself came to exist, landfill built from demolished downtown row houses and subway rubble dumped into Lake Ontario starting in 1959. It follows how DDT nearly wiped the cormorants from the Great Lakes, and how gulls, terns and cottonwoods colonized the rubble before the birds returned. A listening tip: look up at the bare, silvery trees, stripped by the weight of nests overhead.