A Day in May

Over the years, I’ve often spoken about one of the most memorable experiences of my childhood, a golden day in May, when I was perhaps ten or eleven. That morning – it must have been a Saturday – I ventured down the steep path into the ravine behind our house, one of many ancient river valleys that provide a tracery of wildness through Toronto’s urban landscape. That ravine held the first forest I got to know; from the time I could walk, I explored it and made it my personal domain. As I grew more interested in wildlife, I began to learn about its inhabitants: the resident birds, raccoons and squirrels. To my fledgling eyes, my ravine seemed impossibly rich and varied.

Because the valley was wet, giant willows flourished there, as did a jungly tangle of fox grapes and Virginia creeper. Each spring, the stream that ran along the foot of the ravine overflowed, leaving pools where tadpoles grew into frogs and painted turtles sometimes swam. In early May, before the canopy leafed in, the forest floor turned into a brilliant carpet of wildflowers: trilliums, hepaticas and trout lilies.

I didn’t know it then, but my private woodland was only a poor remnant of the rich and majestic mixed forests of maple, beech, ash, white pine and hemlock that had covered most of southern Ontario before the Europeans came. And even back in the early 1940s, the plants and animals shared their space with the inevitable ambassadors of Progress. Twice a day, a steam engine belonging to the city’s now long-gone Belt Line railway puffed its way along a track to deliver coal and ice to the residents of North Toronto. But this predictable daily intrusion did not discourage the annual spring visitation of migrating birds.

In my memory, the day dawns sunny, with the promise of unseasonable warmth. As quietly as one of the characters from Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages – I devoured Seton’s books from a young age – I creep down to my favourite spot, a bower of wild plum blossoms that gives me excellent views of the branches below, already brushed with spring’s first greenery. There I wait, breathing the rich smells of damp earth and decaying leaves, mixed with plum blossom perfume, and listening to the chirp and chatter of the localbirds – totally at ease in my familiar territory. Time passes without any sense of urgency. The sun rises and the day grows warmer. Then, suddenly, as if at some prearranged signal, the migrants come.

Within the space of less than an hour on that unforgettable morning, I saw legions of migrating warblers, as well as kinglets, a yellow-bellied sapsucker and a ruby-throated hummingbird. It seemed as if every branch of every tree was dripping with birds. If perfect happiness is possible, then this was the day I experienced it.