Several years ago I traveled to Toronto, Ontario, for a conservation biology conference. The city sits on the edge of Lake Ontario, and one evening I wandered down to Leslie Street Spit, a three-mile-long peninsula formed from construction debris dumped there during the last century. Upon that rubble grew an unlikely urban wilderness, which is now home to North America’s largest colony of double-crested cormorants—large, fish-eating waterbirds with black plumage and bright blue eyes.
By historical standards Leslie Street Spit’s 30,000 birds were not an exceptionally large colony, but they were still awesome to behold. Even from the distance I kept so as to avoid disturbing them, their physical presence was palpable. It recalled wildlife documentaries on wildebeest migration and emperor penguins, or the sci-fi film trope of a spaceship descending into an extraterrestrial city, vast and teeming, at once alien but recognizable. Shorelines were black with their bodies; each tree might have several dozen nests, built from large sticks in a ramshackle fashion that belied their ability to withstand winds blustering off the lake. On the ground their nests were separated by only a neck’s length. The landscape pulsed with the small movements of mates preening and tending to their young. Their low grunting voices made the air thrum.
Back in Maine, I had grown up disliking cormorants, regarding them as gluttonous competitors for the fish I wanted to catch. Eventually I stopped fishing, but well before that, I decided that their claim trumped mine. How could I begrudge them the fish they relied upon to survive but I caught only for fun? Ever since then I’ve felt an extra affection for them, a bit like when a former nemesis becomes a friend. I’ve also come to see my original antipathy as unwittingly reflecting a millennia-long vilification of the birds.
