Where are the marshes?

The warehouse parking lot had more cars than I’d been expecting. When I’d heard that there were shorebirds near it—from an older man and prolific birder I’d met at a park, which solved the mystery of all the shorebird sightings cropping up on a mysterious road I’d seen on eBird—I’d pictured our car standing out, and my slinking awkwardly away from it to peer at birds. The warehouse had been built by a major corporation who had promptly abandoned it, deciding they had no use for it after all, and for a while it had remained empty. But least part of it was now in use, renters presumably having moved in, and in the end we just parked and headed out onto the sidewalk, barely getting a second glance from the few people around.

Even though we heard birds immediately, and spotted some unknown swallows swooping in the field across the street, both my sister and I remained rather solemn. The whole place was dismal, made up of flooded, gravel-strewn fields, scummy algae blooming where the water was a little deeper, and everything sprinkled with trash. We walked around, noting dozens of red-winged blackbirds, a couple of killdeer, along with one species neither my sister or I had ever seen, since we’ve hardly seen any shorebirds yet: a few least sandpipers, the smallest shorebirds in the world, among the already diminutive family of sandpipers known as “peeps”.

The sky soon opened up and we hurried back to the car, the hulking building blurred shades of grey in the rain. The birds were adorable, their feathers rich brown with an almost scaled look to the pattern. “Barely larger than a sparrow!” I said in surprise, only to be rather amused when I saw the exact same description on their AllAboutBirds page.

But I left with a creeping sense of anger and disgust, and couldn’t stop thinking, over and over again, look what’s been done to this place.

There’s a toxic waste dump—named by some a “waste management facility”—in Blainville, Quebec, that wishes to expand, continuing to eat up more of the wetlands around it and further endangering a nearby bog, an ancient and precious ecosystem some 6,000 years in the making, so that it can bury even more toxic waste (a portion of which is even imported all the way from the United States of America). The town is against this expansion. Residents are against it, as are environmental groups, provincial opposition parties, and practically everyone else besides the ruling rightwing party in this province (Coalition Avenir Québec, or CAQ) and Stablex, the dump itself. So the government forced through the sale of the land in Blainville, supported by the provincial supreme court to which the town turned, and the destruction is ongoing.

I’m a settler on these stolen lands, and it took me until I was a teenager to begin to grasp the overwhelming horror of what colonialism had wrought on the land and its original inhabitants and caretakers—the Kanien'kehá:ka nation where I live now. I also began to understand how different the landscape here had been, cultivated by Indigenous peoples for many thousands of years. I started trying to imagine what that landscape would have been like, ancient forests, trees widely spaced, lush and thriving, superimposed over the scraggly remnants of fresh growth all around me. It was always a fantasy, because what that could look like was an impossible feat of imagination to me, a world I could hear described but could never truly envision. It was real, had been real, but I couldn’t touch it.

The majority of bird species on this continent are declining. With greater research, more and more populations formerly believed to be “stable” show drops as well, and I’ve begun to collect those percentages of loss in my mind as I tuck away each new bird species I see. Cape may warblers, dependent on spruce budworms in their breeding territory in the Canadian boreal forest, have dropped 70% since the 60’s, thanks in part to the forestry industry both destroying habitat and spraying pesticides in order to kill spruce budworm. Snowy owls, once wrongly thought to number in the hundreds of thousands, are now known to number only between 14,000 and 29,000 individuals worldwide, and have undergone a roughly 30% reduction in population in just 30 years (this spring, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada classified the snowy owl as threatened).

In a new tool using data collected through participatory science (all those eBird checklists I mention), population changes are able to be mapped on a much more granular level, and one of the example species shared was the great blue heron, with its breeding population in Quebec highlighted specifically. Using their interactive map, I can look at how much the breeding population of great blue herons has changed along the Saint Lawrence river as it runs past Montreal and on towards the ocean, and see reductions of 17%, 23%, 29% in the decade between 2011 and 2021.

All told, about 3 billion birds have disappeared from North America just since 1970, and I find myself doing the same thing with birds that I used to do with forests. What must it be like, I think, to see flocks of thousands pass overhead? How many rusty blackbirds (some estimates suggesting a drop of 90% or more since the 70’s) might someone have seen on this marshy island 1000 years ago? They are just as much a fantasy, just as much a test of my imagination. I simply can’t fathom what this world once looked like, what it should look like now without a colonial climate collapse in progress.

Yet I feel haunted by those billions of lost birds, their absence resonating in every silence that should echo with sound, and every stillness that should hold fluttering movement.

Next to the Montreal-Trudeau International Airport—the largest airport in the province, and the third busiest in the country—is a stretch of about 230 hectares (over 550 acres) of undeveloped land, which has become a haven for wildlife in what’s otherwise a vast industrial wasteland. The city of Montreal has bought a portion of it, with plans to create the Parc-Nature des Sources, which if they could secure what’s currently an adjacent golf course and a couple of lots leased by the airport from the federal government, would become the largest park on the Island of Montreal. A portion of that land, currently referred to merely as “the Technoparc,” is a fantastic space cared for and enjoyed by locals, conservationists, and birders. I’ve personally been there multiple times this year, watched nesting raptors, then seen a nestling, all frowning fluff, later on in the season.* I’ve seen beavers swimming in one of the ponds, a great egret hunting, and tree swallows nesting in the trees that rise up from it. At least 220 species of birds call this stretch of habitat (at least temporarily) home. The plan to turn all of it into a park is supported by residents, by every nearby municipality, by the Montreal government, by everyone who knows and cares about the technoparc, and even by a former federal environment minister. The only ones against it are the airport themselves, claiming that to turn all of the space into a park would increase the danger of bird collisions, as if more birds would suddenly show up on this currently undeveloped and bird-filled stretch just as soon as the appellation of “park” was officially affixed to it. While the airport is acting as if its plans are a done deal, the federal transport ministry has yet to either approve or deny them.

My sister was vaguely interested in birds before I was, and as my interest turned into obsession, she has happily followed me (though with less obsession), and we often go birding together. On a recent car ride, we ended up talking about red-winged blackbirds (an estimated 28% overall decline since the 60’s). They’re everywhere, in every marsh and marsh-adjacent space, every ditch and flooded field. She talked about how the places we’ve been visiting seem to have 100% of the red-winged blackbirds they could contain, as many red-winged blackbirds per square foot as is possible. So how could they be declining? But then she looked around, and thought: ah, I see, they’re packed into every bit of habitat they can find, and otherwise they have nowhere else to go. Where are the marshes? We live in the St. Lawrence River Valley, a river with the second-largest discharge in North America, in lowlands that are by their nature made up of a huge portion of marshes, swamps, and ephemeral spring wetlands. Yet every single year more disappears, churned under gravel and asphalt, condos and malls. How many red-winged blackbirds can be supported by what habitat is left?

We were stopped at a stoplight by now, and I gestured towards an area between two roads, new construction ongoing, all churned earth and piles of building material. How many red-winged blackbirds do you think lived here last year? I asked, and we went back and forth on estimates: 40, 80, 100? It was recently a wall of rushes—invasive phragmites, I believe, but habitat nonetheless.

Because sometimes the world likes a grim punctuation, as we were talking a red-winged blackbird landed on a length of re-bar.

My dedicated project of learning to identify the birds I encounter has come to feel like the merest possible courtesy I can offer. Not necessarily their taxonomic classification, though that can be part of it, but the knowledge unlocked by my ability to name them. Are they residents, or migrants passing through on their way to somewhere else? What do they eat? Where do they nest? What habitat do they prefer? What do they need from us? An end to the ongoing destruction of habitat, every time, but there’s always more complex understanding needed in order to know the best way to halt and reverse declines. The act of naming does nothing on its own, but recognition seems like the first step: seeing my feathered neighbours—or cherished visitors on continent spanning journeys—for who they are, and understanding them as beings worthy of a world they can thrive in.

The Quebec government has tabled a new bill, bill 97, which would shift even more power over to the logging industry, creating “priority forest management zones” in which there would be no protected zones, no possibility of even a sliver of conservation. As you may guess, a familiar pattern emerging, this is widely opposed by everyone besides the logging industry and the CAQ, the mask of “sustainable forestry” torn off in a dramatic enough way that it’s hard to ignore.

The second time my sister and I visited the flooded field by the warehouse which had been built then promptly abandoned, it was slightly less dismal. The fullness of spring had buried some of the gravel and trash under deeper water and thriving greenery, cursed crowfoot and water plantain having established themselves throughout what could now be termed more seasonal pond than polluted muck. The least sandpipers picked through greenery and garbage both, wandering within just a few feet of us when we stood still and seemed in no danger of stepping on them (my sister had accidentally flushed one before we’d spotted them, her foot landing just a little too close to a mottled brown bird who looked just like the mottled muddy edges of the pond). A killdeer called from the other side of the field, and a barn swallow swooped low to the ground, as the male red-winged blackbirds waged noisy battles with each other above it all, occasionally startling the Canada geese into annoyed honking.

In Blainville, protesters have at various points blocked machinery and the entrance to Stablex itself. While broader plans for an airport expansion exist, no habitat has been destroyed yet. And in response to bill 97, Innu, Atikamekw and Abenaki land defenders have issued eviction notices to logging companies in their lands, while actions in solidarity with them have already started to crop up in Montreal. It looks like it will be a summer of blockades, people fighting to protect what’s left.

Ever since that warehouse was built on former marshland, when we drove past it (which was frequently), my sister would mutter furiously, “look what they did to my marsh.” The anger is no less strong, but now the both of us also think of the birds when we pass, the least and spotted sandpipers, greater and lesser yellowlegs, dunlins and Wilson’s snipes who have been seen there since the fields flooded this spring. It makes it much more personal, knowing that they’re there, doing their best to navigate this tattered world, surviving for now. And I know that I never want to live in a world where all of these incredible birds aren’t living in it alongside me.

*I’ve been deliberately vague about species here, because nesting raptors tend to draw a lot of people who can disturb them, especially photographers behaving wildly unethically in order to get photos of nestlings and fledglings. So I choose to either be vague about species or location, never specific about both, in order to help protect them.