Leslie St Spit - November 2025

Leslie St Spit might be my favourite place in Toronto. Partly because it is simply an amazing park, partly because its phoenix-like history is particularly inspiring, partly because I discovered it at a time when I really needed a place to go be with nature and it provided.

I have recently moved much closer (it was actually a significant factor in my choice of location) and am very much looking forward to the opportunities that provides. Like heading down on a whim on a Tuesday evening to settle in and see what I see.

The only fly in the ointment was a suddenly glitchy camera; its touchscreen going haywire as though a hundred fingers were constantly tapping it all over. It makes it extremely difficult but not technically impossible to film anything. So I soldiered ahead, and will troubleshoot as best I can, throwing microfibre cloths and firmware updates at it on a hope and a prayer.

Bugged out camera aside, the first sign of life I saw was serendipitous - black capped chickadees who I am doing an episode on this winter.

I also got a tip-off about a gorgeous hawk (my raptor identification is still embarrassingly bad) posing on a pole, and then a spindly branch, just off the main path. 

Finally I settled in at the shoreline of the inspiringly-named ‘cell 3’, the largest inlet in the park. That shoreline is

inaccessible for most of the spring and summer, but the water level has receded enough for a strip of dirt and gravel to show. 

Already you can see the conglomeration of waterfowl who overwinter in the park and will congregate at increasingly limited open water as the ice encroaches. For now they have the whole ‘cell’ to hang out in but group in the southwest corner. A whole host of ducks punctuated with mute swans feeding and calling vociferously. 

This was an exploratory trip but one of the longer episodes I’m working on deals with the history of swans in Ontario so I positioned myself opposite the setting sun to catch them in sparkling reflections and side-lit as they groomed a few meters away on the shore. I grabbed a discarded feather as well, to shoot in macro at a home studio setup. 

The hawk was a very nice bonus. As for the chickadees, it was good confirmation that they won’t be too hard to find, but with my camera glitching out (the phantom screen-taps most often jumped between a full and punched-in view for focus adjustment, so I could barely see what the frame actually looked like except in flickering little half-seconds) it was almost impossible to track them. The camera was usable when dealing with large, fairly stationary creatures (your swans, your hawks…) but a very mobile, very active chickadee proved just too frustrating to be worth it. 

Fingers crossed fixing the camera issue is something I can do myself. The internet is warning me that this is commonly a hardware issue requiring screen replacement - an extended repair timeline and conservatively $500 to get it done…