Happy waawaaskone giizis (very very late this month!)

“The fifth moon of Creation is Flower Moon, where all plants display their Spirit sides for all the world to see. This life giving energy is one of the most powerful healing medicines on Mother Earth. During this moon we are encouraged to explore our Spiritual essences.”

First pocket forests are planted!

Update by Josh

As part of an effort to grow Kingston into a City in a Forest, we’ve been helping people plant pocket forests. So far we've planted approximately 10 pocket forests and are working with a number of other sites (including one condo) to prepare for a fall planting. A pocket forest is an easy way for you to help mitigate the effects of the climate and biodiversity crises while choosing the type of planting that makes the most sense for your space. The pocket forest you plant today will provide a treat for your senses for many years to come, increasing the number of smells, colours, sounds and tastes all available in your front or back yard. All the while providing cleaner air, sucking up excess water and cooling your house in the summer.

We’ll help plant a biodiverse selection of native trees and shrubs which will provide flowers, food and habitat for birds, butterflies allowing you to enjoy a veritable nature show while sipping your morning coffee or tea.  If this sounds like a lovely way to bring a sense of peace and connection to your home, email [email protected] and we’ll come out for a consult.

The most popular activity was twisting together pipe cleaners to represent the vascular and branching structure of trees. Notice how these structures are mirrored in the drawing of a Bur Oak done by one of the participants.

Updates

Rodden Park

Update by Josh

On Thursday May 9th, a group of LFK folks and other interested parties got together to discuss the idea of planting a Little Forest, a Paw Paw research patch and Oak Savannah in Rodden Park. At least that was the plan but unfortunately a broken water tank caused the Seniors' Centre to have to close. For the author, this news brought on a moment of anxiety. The Seniors Centre generously offered to put out chairs for us to meet outside but the forecast called for rain so that didn't seem like a good idea. They also offered to find us other space but, again, how would we let people know in a timely fashion. The Seniors' Centre efforts to help were deeply appreciated and ultimately some of us chose to be at the Seniors Centre to let people know why the meeting was canceled and collect emails from those who were interested. We then ended up giving the approximately 25 folks who came, a tour of the Little Forests. The tour also included a lovely chat where we agreed to meet the next week for the actual meeting. Which we did. 

At the meeting on the 16th of May, we spoke about how important it is to follow the idea of co-design used by Little Forests Kingston to best determine where and what types of plantings would work best. At the end of the meeting, it was agreed by all that the idea of a Little Forest, Paw Paw patch, and/or other plantings is well worth continuing to explore. We're hoping to have our next meeting sometime between June 17 and the 28th. That meeting will focus on perspective taking to make sure we integrate the needs of all the beings that will use the park. We'll then follow up this meeting with 1-2 meetings that will focus on co-designing what should go where.  We'd love it if you'd like to take part in these discussions. Please email Joanna Cooke at [email protected] to get emailed updates.

Van Order Drive

Update by Nathan

Interested residents at the Kingston Frontenac Housing Corporation Van Order Drive complex met this past Wednesday, April 22 at 10 to get an update on the progress of the project. The planting area will consist of two little forests, one of about 130 m2 and one of about 150 m2 (on the foreground left and midground right in the picture) separated by grass and by an alvar habitat garden funded by the city climate action champion fund. Planting of the habitat garden will take place in about 2 weeks. If you are interested in helping, contact Nathan Nesdoly at 343-363-0492 or email him at [email protected]. Residents will also be planting a berry patch (not in the picture) that will help to increase the privacy of the area. The little forests will be planted in the fall and are being funded by Beacon Design Collective, a forward-thinking design firm from Vancouver honouring us with a gift of $12 000 for out KFHC projects, recognizing our excellent work in biodiversity but also in community development. 

205 Bagot Street

Update by Nathan

The planning process for a little forest planting at 205 Bagot Street is ongoing. Recently, we discovered that our planting site, like so many others in the urban core of the city, was partially underlain by a thick strata of gravel in about half of our planting area. We will not have enough area to plant a Miyawaki style little forest, which requires a minimum of 100 m2—we will now fall short by about 30 m2. However, plans are going ahead. The new plan will include 4 pocket forest including a Keystone Pocket Forest, a Food Pocket Forest, a Bird Pocket Forest and Noise Barrier Pocket Forest, as well as two crushed gravel pathways to a central meeting area situated in a Pocket Prairie.

Portsmouth District Little Forest

Update by Nathan

Work is also ongoing at the Portsmouth District Little Forest Project at the Seniors Centre, with volunteers engaged in weeding, planting, organizing stewardship, digging new planting beds (including a Beetle Bank designed to host key predatory species) and maintaining the trees. Our trees suffered much more rabbit damage than anticipated. Our spraying regimen for the late fall and winter was not adequate. It was a hard lesson, but we will adjust our practice accordingly.

Almost 500 plants, winter sowed from seeds obtained from the Hatter Street Garden, will be planted throughout the area in a couple of weeks (we are waiting for the plants to get a little bit bigger and for rain!)

Gifting pocket forests to migratory birds

“Pick the right night and you will hear them... As midnight approaches, find a quiet spot away from the rumbles and groans of urban life and listen carefully. Soon you will hear soft chirps and whistles drifting down from the sky. These are the calls of migrating songbirds. A thousand feet above you, extending for hundreds of miles in all directions, is a vast highway of little birds heading [north].… The sky is alive.”David Wilcove, The Way Home

City staff, as part of Kingston’s 2023-2026 Strategic Plan, are reporting back to Council by the end of 2024 on the potential to work towards Nature Canada’s Bird Friendly Certification to Intermediate Level.

Birds are an indicator species for ecosystem health. And what they’re telling us is alarming. According to Partners in Flight, in the Lower Great Lakes/St. Lawrence Plain Region, Bird Conservation Region 13 portion of the Eastern Habitat Joint Venture, aerial insectivores—birds that forage insects on the wing like Barn Swallows—have experienced population declines of up to 95%. Even the populations of common birds such as Red-Winged Blackbirds and Dark-Eyed Juncos, are declining.

Birds need our help! And one of the first things we can do is learn more about birds, the habitat they need, who overwinters in our area, who the migrants are, and then begin transforming our landscaping (along with other practices) to support them.  

On May 11, we celebrated World Migratory Bird Day, welcoming spring neotropical migrants to the Kingston area.

“In the southern and western United States, 50-60 percent of breeding birds are migrants, a number that rises to 80 percent in southern Canada and to 90 percent in the Canadian subarctic.”

Kingston Field Naturalists (a great group to join to learn more about birds) write that:

“Kingston sits astride the Atlantic Flyway, a major migration route. Millions of birds travel through the area enroute to their breeding grounds, and then return again in the autumn as they head back to their wintering areas. This makes the area one of Ontario’s premier birding destinations.”

According to a land manager’s guide to conserving habitat for forest birds in southern Ontario:

“Forested habitats within 5 km of the Great Lakes (especially Lake Erie and Lake Ontario) provide roosting areas, cover from predators and foul weather, and food for large numbers of migratory birds. Diverse, mature forests with shrub and sapling layers will provide a high diversity of edible fruits and nuts in the fall that allow migrants to replenish their resources prior to the next leg of their journey.”

One of the ways we can help neotropical migrants is plant (and protect!) multi-layered, biodiverse plant communities. Pocket forests! According to birds in the burbs: do migratory birds prefer urban forest fragments or residential yards?

“The vegetation type and structural differences of these urban sites change the abundance and type of birds that use them because different birds use different parts of trees/forests for foraging… Residential areas that maintained more vegetation at the ground, understory, midstory, and canopy compared to other residential sites, attracted greater abundance and diversity of migratory birds compared to other residential sites… with a higher percentage of mowed lawns and impervious surfaces.”

Since insects are the most critical food source for migratory birds, they’re the focus of this year’s World Migratory Bird Day.  

“Insects are essential sources of energy for many migratory bird species, not only during the breeding seasons but also during their extensive journeys and greatly affect the timing, duration, and overall success of bird migrations.Along their migration routes, birds actively seek out insects in fields, forests, wetlands, and various habitats during stopovers. The timing of bird migration often coincides with peak insect abundance at stopover locations, supplying nourishment for birds to replenish their energy reserves before continuing their journeys.”

While the excerpt of the beneficial native plant chart above is for the Midwest, most of the species in the chart are also native in our area. If you download the complete chart, you’ll notice how critical native trees and shrubs are compared to native forbs for many spring migrants, offering a bounty of flowers and insects and — for those who stay to breed — nesting habitat. Their leaf litter (always leave the leaves!) also harbours a wealth of insects for birds to forage.

One migrant are Veery. Veery fly up to 285 km in one night and forage in the forest understory for insects and fruit. While most urban forest plantings are too small to make good breeding habitat for forest birds like Veery, urban forest fragments are important to them during migration.

“Although some birds might require large expanses of forest to successfully breed, during migration, they may use a variety of habitats, including urban forest fragments. The Veery (Catharus fuscescens) is a good example… they use small forest fragments, clear-cuts, residential trees, and forest edges while migrating to their breeding grounds in South America.”

Want to explore the incredible journeys (and timing) of migratory birds? Audubon has an amazing bird migration explorer. You can filter the map to see only species in our area or you can filter on a selected species such as the Baltimore Oriole to see their winter range, track when they begin their migration, and discover when they arrive in our area.

Interested in planting a pocket forest for the birds, gifting a pocket forest to a neighbour, or helping us find pocket forest sites in your neighbourhood? Email [email protected]

The voices of birds and the language of belonging

Can you feel the difference between the two experiences (one extractive, one relational) described in the article birding vs listening to bird language? Jon Young, author of What a Robin Knows, calls “bird language is an interspecies communications system.”

“We are often … a jarring, unaware presence in the world beyond the front door. If we’re in bird language mode, however, we’re moving with a whole different frame of mind and venturing into another realm of awareness and intention and curiosity.”

David George Haskell in the voices of birds and the language of belonging says:

“When bird language entered my life, I felt that a new sense had been grafted into me. Bird voices opened a fresh dimension of sensory experience. This expansion drew me into stories of my home in unexpected ways, revealing ecological rhythms and connections, stimulating my curiosity, and suffusing me with a sense of belonging…attending to the tongues of other species is our inheritance, bequeathed by a lineage of ancestors extending back hundreds of millions of years. Every one of these grandmothers and grandfathers lived in attentive relationship with the sounds of other species, the diverse conversation of the living Earth.” 

Here are Haskell’s five invitations for stepping into an attentive relationship with the voices of birds:

• Invitation one: sonic diversity

• Invitation two: rhythms and change

• Invitation three: physicality

• Invitation four: names

• Invitation five: sharing

“Today, in a world beset by ecological crises, our survival depends on our attentiveness to the speech of other species. Without their voices to guide us, we act in ignorance. This is an improvident path for so powerful a species. Hearing bird language, then, is a pleasure that can guide us to right action.”