Birdwatcher Watching Decline of Birds

From the Greater Toronto, Toronto Star, Wednesday, January 23, 2008, page A11, an article about birdwatcher Graeme Gibson and his concerns about the birds:

AND FEW BIRDS SANG

'If you are a birdwatcher, you know the Earth is in trouble,' says author Graeme Gibson, who sees their decline as bad for the globe - and our souls

Catherine Dunphy
Staff Reporter

The birdman of the Annex despairs at this time of year. The only sound from outside the plate glass of the Avenue Rd. restaurant where he sips his organic beer is that of the horns of motorists furious at the person making an illegal left at Davenport.

Birdsong?

Graeme Gibson's generous eyebrows rise behind his glasses.

"There are relatively few birds around town now," he says. "It's like creeping senility."

There were once many more cardinals, blue jays - even crows, which were decimated by the West Nile virus - about town. The best we can do now is salute winter's rough 'n' weather-ready starlings, pigeons, gulls - admittedly brown birds the colour of slush, ordinary birds, not the stuff of awe, wonder, colour and musicality.

The 82nd annual Christmas bird count held by the Toronto Ornithological Club on a balmy Sunday in December recorded 89 species, including 56,022 individual birds. Then again, 21,523 of them were European starlings, up from their 2005 tally of 12,000-plus.

On the bright side, there is a red-tailed hawk - "very big, very handsome" - lurking near a Richmond St. condominium.

"It's two feet when it stands on my friend's balcony. A marvellous bird. I've seen it."

He once watched it chase a flock of pigeons on Charles St. just west of Yonge. Thrilling. "They exploded into the sky," Gibson says.

He is often watching for birds. A respected author (Five Legs, Perpetual Motion) before he compiled the best selling The Bedside Book of Birds, in which he turned a passion begun at age 37 into an orgiastic, glorious - and award-winning - book not about birds but about people's relationship with them.

In it Gibson writes: "One of the rewards of birdwatching is the brief escape it affords our ancient and compelling need to make Nature useful. There may even be something of Thoreau's 'true knowledge' in that evanescent taste of freedom."

He also writes: "At its best, in its heightened moments, birdwatching can encourage a state of being close to rapture - the fogetfulness that blends the individual consciousness with something other than itself. Some people call it 'flow,' others enlightenment.'"

Gibson, 73, believes it might save the world.

"If you look out the window and don't see nature," he says, gesturing towards Avenue Rd., "all you see is culture. You are separated from nature."

Here connects by birdwatching in Toronto's ravings, the Summerhill reservoir, beside the Humber and Don rivers where migrating birds fly by, at Mt. Pleasant cemetery and in Rosedale's Craigleith Gardens. It grounds his activism these days. He was one of the founders of the Writers Union of Canada, the Books and Periodical Council, the Writers Development Trust, plus an early president of PEN Canada in 1987.

He is a founding user of Bullfrog Power, an alternative energy provider, at the Annex home he shares with his partner, writer Margaret Atwood. The pair are also joint presidents of the rare birds club of Bird Life International, a global alliance of conservation organizations.

"If you are a birdwatcher, you know the Earth is in trouble," he says.

He believes he first glimpsed the spectable of bird life in full flight as a 14-year-old in 1948, from the bow of the freighter that brought his family from Austrlia back to Canada and London, Ont., where he grew up.

He moved to Toronto to pursue teaching, then writing, and although he was an outdoorsy person keen on canoeing and hiking, he was pretty much oblivious to birds - until one day when, while walking in the Don Valley in the late '70s, he spotted a red-tailed hawk under the Bloor viaduct. Intrigued, he bought a bird book, then a pair of binoculars.

His birdwatching has since taken him all over the world. While sailing near Isabella Island, part of the Galapagos Islands, he spotted an albatross through an unexpected break in blinding rain. He felt as if he had received a gift, he says, and decided then to begin collecting writings and artifacts about how humans relate to birds.

For years he led birdwatching tours to Cuba, a primary source of his income, he notes.

Now, for about a third of every year, he and Atwood live in their home on Pelee Island, where he was instrumental in founding the Pelee Island Bird Observatory six years ago.

"Graeme has been critical to the (conservation) movement," says conservation theorist Elizabeth Agnew. "He and Margaret are both crack birders."

Agnew visited Cuba with Gibson. "Oh my goodness, it's like travelling with Mick Jagger," she says. "He's an entity and a quantity."

He's bemused by this. And by the propensity of birdwatchers to keep competitive lists of sightings. The only list he keeps is of birds seen in his backyard - because he's competing with no one, only revelling in the whir and strobe light flash of the fleeting presence of the creature believed to represent all our dreams.

Don't Wash Car in Your Driveway: Use Car Wash or Rain

Now I thought leaving the rain to wash your car was the most eco-friendly thing to do, but if you must have a shiny car, the following article encourages you to go to a car wash, as it is an environmentally more friendly thing to do. This is from the Saturday, September 15, 2007, Living Section of the Toronto Star, page L13:

Enlightened Shopper

GO GREEN -- PAY FOR YOUR CAR WASH
Driveway hosing contaminates waterways, experts say

David Rider
Toronto Star

In the coming season, aptly named because half of nature suddenly falls down upon us, a car parked outside can quickly take on the appearance of a giant rolling chia pet.

The options are either clear leaves off the windows and pretend you're driving one of those vegetation-sprouting "art cars" or get the thing washed.

With nature literally staring you in the face, you're doing it a favour by running a hose on the driveway instead of putting your vehicle through one of those big commercial car washes, right?

Not so, say the Canadian Car Wash Association, environmental groups and the City of Toronto. While driveway washing may be cheap and, for many, a relaxing weekend ritual, it can unleash a nasty brew of gasoline, oil, exhaust residue and traces of heavy metals into storm sewers that discharge directly into Lake Ontario and other waterways.

Also, car wash equipment is carefully designed to use as little water as possible, typically about a quarter of the amount used in a driveway wash, experts say.

"There's no comparison -- washing a car at home is terrible for the environment, especially if you're doing it on a hard surface like a driveway where significant discharge runs right into storm sewers," says Kevin Mercer, a volunteer with Riversides Stewardship Alliance (riversides, org, 4116-868-1983), a Toronto-based group that fights water pollution.

Detritus from cars, including engine fluids and bits of brake pad, pollute water bodies and pose a risk to aquatic life, as do soapy detergents, Mercer says.

If commercial car washes got rid of their waste water the same way, they'be charged under city and provincial regulations. They must separate out solids, as well as grease and oil, for proper landfill disposal. The water left over goes down sanitation sewers that flow, like the ones in your home, to a city facility for treatment.

Mercer says community groups should find ways to raise funds other than holding charity car washes, unless they enlist the help of a commercial car wash or get use of a Latimat system (http://www.latimat.com/) that puts a pad under the vehicle to contain and collect the runoff.

Michael D'Andrea, the city's director of infrastructure management, says a multi-year plan to clean up waterways and the waterfront includes educating people not to put dirt and chemicals down storm drains -- so don't wash your car on a driveway.

If for some reason you have to wash it at home, he says, do it on a porous surface, such as your lawn, so runoff doesn't go into a storm sewer. When you're done, put the soapy water down your basement or laundry drain so it gets treated.

While homeowners who let soap and other runoff go down storm sewers could technically be fined under a city bylaw, officials opt for education, D'Andrea says.

He advises consumers to ask at their car wash if they recycle their water, reducing the amount they use while also decreasing the level of contaminants.

One self-serve car wash in Etobicoke, Wash N' Go (4000 Dundas St. W.), uses solar power to heat its water, though it is augmented by a boiler in winter.

"The biggest trend in our industry is really a green trend," says owner Vito Cosentino, who is also president of the industry's national association.

"Solar is great for us -- we reduce utility costs and use it as a tool to market the business."

Asked about other industry trends, Cosentino mentions one that's about cleaning up another type of environment.

"We have a fragrance machine to get smells out of cars and we get an incredible amount of traffic from teenagers at 1 a.m. trying to mask the smell of cigarette or pot smoke from dad's car."

David Rider is an editor at the Star. Reach him at drider@thestar.ca .