Bioblitz teachers turning over a log to study insects.Katherine Collin
Caitlin Stall-Paquet is a Montreal-based writer and editor.
On a sunny morning in April, I peer through the lens of a powerful telescope to find varying shades of brown and grey. A red-shouldered hawk has set up shop in a tree on the campus of Montreal’s Vanier College.
“At the very top of the nest, you can see a grey that’s slightly different. That’s actually the back of one of the adults,” Christopher Cloutier, an instructor in the college’s environmental and wildlife management department, tells me. “Last year, it’s funny, we were leading this walk, and that was one of the first birds we saw circling over, so everyone got to see it. It’s kind of like the celebrity bird of these walks.”
The walks in question are part of an annual global event called the City Nature Challenge. During the challenge, cities will hold their own versions of what’s called a BioBlitz, which involves residents going out and identifying as many local species as possible by uploading photos to an app called iNaturalist. The app hosts a vast online community that confirms the nature sightings of its user base.
April’s event marked the third year of Vanier College’s participation in the City Nature Challenge, which is organized globally by the California Academy of Sciences and Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History; and in Canada by the Canadian Wildlife Federation, as well as Greater Montreal’s the Campus Biodiversity Network in conjunction with the conservation non-profit Technoparc Oiseaux.
Sometimes it takes just one very enthusiastic person for passion to become contagious. That’s what I realize while watching CBN’s founder, Katherine Collin (also an instructor at Vanier), as she stands on a bench next to her co-organizers and animatedly explains the day’s activities to a crowd of 150 or so students and instructors (plus one encroaching journalist) gathered before her. Ms. Collin’s enthusiasm as a local birder is apparent, as she’s decked out in Muck Boots with a serious pair of binoculars around her neck and a camera equipped with a massive zoom lens hanging at her hip. Almost everyone present has downloaded iNaturalist and is ready to start logging species.
Vanier College, along with many schools that are members of Quebec’s Federation of Cégeps, has set up a geo-located iNaturalist project, meaning that every species tracked on the school’s grounds gets added to a broader database. During an interview a few weeks prior, Ms. Collin explained to me that, along with providing great opportunities for outdoor education, campuses worldwide are important biodiversity hubs. For example, nine campuses at the University of Tokyo are part of the CBN, and the green spaces they control represent significant amounts of the limited green spaces found in the city over all.
As the group starts walking away from the street, toward wilder areas of the grounds that are part of a 50-hectare green corridor, I lockstep with a few teachers, all of whom have their phones out to take snapshots of plants, birds and small animals. One rabbit has the unenviable task of trying to stay extremely still until the group moves on. As I chat with the instructors, I note that Ms. Collin has cast a broad, nature-loving net into Vanier’s faculties, reeling in not just the science departments, but also people such as English teacher Stacey DeWolfe. She puts an emphasis on “mad science” in her syllabus, as her students read Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein and eventually make their way to writings about Elon Musk.
Ms. Collin herself is an English instructor who teaches Jane Eyre, lingering on its introduction, in which the protagonist reads Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds by the window. Ms. Collin makes a habit of bringing in her own first-edition copy of that field guide to class, to demonstrate that a love of nature runs through many fields of study. For Ms. DeWolfe, the BioBlitz is one of four hands-on, end-of-semester activities she encourages her students to partake in as they read from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Once we arrive near the cemetery abutting campus, I spot Ms. Collin drawing a small group’s attention to a bird darting between headstones. It’s an Eastern Phoebe. She explains that, like many birds, its name is onomatopoetic and starts to imitate its high-pitched “phee-BEE, phee-BEE!” call. Ms. Collin is a natural educator, dishing out fun facts and identification tips as she flits between groups of students and teachers like one of those fast-moving birds. Lara Rinaldi, a multimedia student at Vanier, looks like a pro as she sits on a log taking photos of flowering red buds fallen from alder trees. However, her interest in nature is new. “Now, when I’m at home, I look at the birds and fungi. I can spot them because of iNaturalist, and I show them to my friends,” says Ms. Rinaldi, who learned to use the identification app just four weeks earlier.
The BioBlitz intrinsically highlights, one species ID at a time, that you don’t need to drive hours away from home and climb mountains to “be in nature”; instead, you can just step outside. It also proves that nature is for everyone. Vanier instructor Heather Robb has seen fast changes happen in students taking her urban-life-themed literature course. “We talk about the immigration experience, walkability and the link between walkability and happiness,” she says. “Something that comes up is the theme of taking solace in green space, and that nature is not something you have to leave the city for.” She describes the transformative effect that discovering nature on walks in urban surroundings had on one of her students, noting that on one particular walk, “he acted like his mind was blown. … He blew up the stats [on iNaturalist] with all his observations.”
There’s a friendly competitive edge to the BioBlitz, and the chapters of the City Nature Challenge located across Canada are no exception. Despite Quebec’s later blooming season, especially when compared with the West Coast, this year Montreal had the largest turnout to its BioBlitz in terms of number of participants for the second year in a row, with 881 people making 14,046 observations. On seeing the stats, I wondered how many of those people were directly or tangentially recruited by Ms. Collin and her spreading web of enthusiasm. There’s no immediate prize to be won for these efforts, but the takeaway benefits can be long-lasting.
Beyond spending time outdoors and using screens to learn more about what lives around us, there’s also substantial utility to citizen-collected scientific data. Any observation uploaded to iNaturalist has the potential to reach “research-grade” status (which is awarded to a post once a particular number of users have verified the observation), which means it gets added to the app’s global biodiversity online archive. That archive, in turn, has become a source of valuable information for municipalities and other organizations focused on biodiversity and conservation. “What we’ve seen with current attempts by cities to stake out conserved spaces to be protected under conservation, we have [also seen] them referring directly to this data,” Ms. Collin told me. “It really cannot be overstated how significant any single one person’s observation can be to contributing to this whole personal profile that’s being offered for a space.”
The Eastern Phoebe, pictured at Cégep de Saint-Laurent in Montreal last month, has an onomatopoetic name taken from its high-pitched call.Bruce Norton
The following Sunday, at the tail end of the BioBlitz, I drove to Dorval, Que., with my pal Alexi Hobbs, a photographer with a thirst for bird-spotting on par with Ms. Collin’s. We met up with Ms. Collin and Katharine Bernicky, a member of the Dorval Bird Committee, as well as a local women’s birding group, at the entrance of a small, yet-to-be-officially named park. Located on Mousseau-Vermette Avenue, the park has a short walking path that snakes along a renatured creek, where banks have been stabilized by planting indigenous species that also attract pollinators. Dorval City Councillor Christopher von Roretz happens to be standing by, at a table displaying information about local species of plants and animals and a sign advertising the City Nature Challenge, which Dorval was participating in for the first time. The community is also in the process of becoming a bird-friendly city, which includes criteria such as having regulations about pesticide use and keeping cats indoors or on leashes, informing people about the dangers of leaving lights on at night during migration periods, creating naturalized areas such as this restored creek, and doing outreach to teach people about the birds in the area and how to use iNaturalist.
Dorval, which is home to the Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, may seem like an unlikely place to focus on conservation, and Mr. von Roretz has heard as much from the town’s population. “They’ll ask, ‘Why are we trying to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by encouraging electric cars when we’ve got an airport next to us?’ But I think that’s all the more reason to,” he says. “The airport is federal land through the Crown corporation. … The city has no control over that. What we do have control over is our spaces, and what can we try to do beyond what we have control over is educate other people.”
Ms. Bernicky, who has lived nearby for years, had never heard of this site. As we walk along the creek, she tells me she first got into birding when she was bored in her backyard during the pandemic. “It’s like real-life Pokémon Go,” she says, before our friends ahead of us on the path call us over in hushed tones. Perched up in a tree, surrounded by the songs of plenty of other species in the height of migration season, are two black-crowned night herons, birds that weigh in at around two pounds each. Though not a rare bird per se, they’re a rare sight for a busy spot like that one – a tiny stretch of rejuvenated creek sandwiched between Autoroute 20 and a housing development.
After an hour of wandering, while mostly keeping my eyes on the ground, noting the reintroduced native plants, Alexi has clocked 23 bird species. That diversity highlights the importance of interconnected cities, where patches of protected green space make a difference in bringing back wildlife. No matter how small, to quote Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. Learning about what lives around us, and providing those species with patches of sanctuary that can gradually be linked up, might just ensure that our still-living creatures don’t go the way of dinosaurs, too.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that the City Nature Challenge is organized globally, with the participation of five different groups; and to correct the spelling of English teacher Stacey DeWolfe's first name.