Wildwood Parkette

Hidden away on a side-street named Wildwood Crescent, in Toronto's Gerrard and Woodbine area, is a small park along the railway track called Wildwood Parkette. Its significance is the number of wildlife species which can be found in the city, if even a small space is friendly to them.

Because the grass and wildflowers are seldom cut along the railway track, a surprising variety of plants can be observed there, and the seeds from them resut in wildflowers popping up on the park lawn. The wildflowers include milkweed, Canada goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace, chicory, common sowthistle, butter-and-eggs, white sweet clover, small hop clover, white clover, red clover, tumble mustard, dandelion, pigweed, bluet, and columbine. The far side of the tracks has a beautiful, long patch of dame's rocket, and the fence on the park side has Virginia creeper.

Insects include monarch butterflies, bumblebees, cabbage white butterflies, cicadas, field crickets, and carpenter ants.

Much of the side of the park which is along the tracks has trees, both inside and outside of the railway fence. I once watched a yellow-bellied sapsucker systematically making holes in a branch of one of the Scotch pines. Another time I saw a barred owl, resting up on a tree branch during the day.

Other birds seen there include: song sparrow, junco, robin, marsh hawk, chickadee, crow, ring-billed gull, starling, pigeon, house sparrow, mourning dove, cardinal, blue jay, hermit thrush, golden-crowned kinglet, house finch, yellow-shafted flicker, and tree swallow.

Railway tracks also serve as corridors along which mammals travel, most notably coyotes. One time a women living a few streets further south reported seeing a deer in her back yard, and it would have travelled along the railway tracks and then down to her garden.