Image from Adam Shoalts's Where the Falcon Flies.Courtesy the Author
Adam Shoalts is a historian, archeologist, geographer, and Westaway Explorer-in-Residence at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His latest book is Where the Falcon Flies: A 3,400 Kilometre Odyssey From My Doorstep to the Arctic.
It was an April morning when I chanced to glance out the front window of our little house in St. Williams, Ont., near Long Point on Lake Erie. Gliding across the cornfield opposite our home was a bird – but no ordinary bird. It was a bird that you’re unlikely to forget if you’ve seen one: a peregrine falcon.
The fastest animals on the planet, these impressive raptors are only about the size of a crow, but their large wings make them superb fliers. Each spring, peregrines will migrate thousands of kilometres from Southern Ontario (and elsewhere) to the remotest reaches of Canada’s Arctic, where they make nests. By the end of summer, when their eggs have hatched and the little ones are big enough, they return south.
Watching the falcon out my window, I felt instantly the pull of wild places. I’d seen falcons before: from the stern of my canoe when I’d paddled almost 4,000 kilometres alone across the Arctic a few years earlier. Living as we do in rural Ontario, where urban sprawl, traffic and congestion seem to pile up more every year, the solitudes of the northern wilderness can feel unrelated to anything local. But the falcon made me think of all the connections between the Arctic and my front yard – and everywhere else in Canada. Not only peregrines, but snow geese, sandhill cranes, sandpipers and hundreds of other Arctic birds migrate every year, depending in the process on little pockets of woods and wildness from south to north to make their journeys.
So naturally in that moment, a perfectly sensible thought crossed my mind: Why not grab my backpack and my canoe and follow that falcon from our front porch? What better way could there be to explore all those connections than to paddle and hike from my doorstep to the Arctic? When I traced a hypothetical route on a map from Long Point, it seemed possible (in theory). That’s exactly what I ended up doing in the spring and summer of last year.
My journey took me through stormy Lake Erie, down the Niagara River (there’s a notable waterfall on this river), then along Lake Ontario, which included a night camping under the Burlington Skyway, as well as a stormbound night on Toronto’s waterfront. This made for quite a contrast with what I’m normally used to doing in Canada’s wilderness, as well as the end part of this journey, which took me into the lonely solitudes of the Torngat Mountains and to the Arctic coast of Ungava.
Along the way, I experienced a variety of challenges: avoiding getting run over by busy commercial freighter traffic, Great Lakes storms and gale-force winds, massive hydroelectric dams, bushwhacking without trails, dealing with hunger as my granola bars dwindled, multiple bear encounters, and navigating white-water rapids on icy northern rivers.
What kept me motivated to keep crawling out of my tent before dawn into the frosty mornings, pull on wet socks, and set off on another day’s adventures was the unexpected landscapes I’d come across, with their half-forgotten histories, often very ancient trees, rich marshes bursting with birds, beautiful farmers’ fields, old towns and new cities, and the connection between these seemingly unrelated places, especially the wildlife. The vast majority of Arctic birds are migratory, including peregrine falcons. Each fall, they return from the Arctic to Southern Ontario (and beyond), where they spend the winter, until embarking on their journeys again in the spring. As a result, even in the hearts of our cities, if you know where and when to look, it’s possible to spot Arctic species. All along my 3,400-kilometre route I was fascinated (and delighted) to see little oases of wild (including even in the Greater Toronto Area and Montreal) that provide critical stopover sites for birds on their Arctic journeys (and sometimes did for me too).
It’s a reminder of the interconnectedness of wild places, from our biggest cities to the remotest reaches of the Arctic. Much attention has understandably been focused on saving wild places in the Far North, but as the flight of the falcon illustrates, to do so, we must also save wild spaces in Canada’s South. When we do so, not just wildlife benefits – we all do.