I grew up in a new subdivision in the far northeastern corner of the Carolinian life zone, in Don Mills, in what was then the very edge of metropolitan Toronto. I remember walking down the street to feed the horses, and at night hearing Chorus Frogs calling from a pond near the four-lane Highway 401. My friends and I would make weekend jaunts to the neighbourhood ravine where we would discover an abundance of living creatures -- snakes, chipmunks, minnows, frogs, turtles and tadpoles. As I grew up, the nearby farm became an apartment building and a parking lot. The 401 expanded to twelve lanes. The stream in the ravine was converted into a storm sewer and covered with a flat monoculture of lawn. And the creatures that had so delighted me and my friends gradually and silently vanished.
In my teens I discovered the wonder and excitement of birds, which could still be seen in great numbers in migration in the ravine. This would set me off on a zig-zag path to a career in conservation. One of my first big projects involved an ecological survey of Carolinian Canada’s eastern bookend, the Rouge Valley, in 1990. Even though I left the Carolinian zone to live elsewhere in the province in the mid-1990s, I had the privilege of helping create the Big Picture vision map in 1999 when I was ecologist with Ontario’s Natural Heritage Information Centre. My life circled back again to Carolinian Canada in the mid-2000s when I became involved with the Carolinian Woodlands Recovery Team. Since then, there’s been no turning back, and I’ve been working with Carolinian Canada to make the Big Picture vision a reality. My dream is that, one day, a child in any neighbourhood in southern Ontario can again fall asleep to the sound of calling frogs, and entire communities in southern Ontario celebrate the wonder and diversity of healthy Nature that surrounds and sustains them. It seems we are off to a good start, for today, in our city of 30,000 people, a chubby American Toad with jeweled irises of gold appeared on our front doorstep, and the Tulip Tree seedling we planted in our garden last year has just unfurled her leaves for another year of growth and hope.