Andrea Chreston is standing at a lookout point at the edge of a wetland, pointing to a pair of trumpeter swans with three cygnets cruising through a blanket of lily pads.
It’s hard to believe that in years past, this green oasis on Toronto’s waterfront was a barren wasteland.
“This was a moonscape twenty years ago,” says Ms. Chreston, senior project manager at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. “The vegetation has really come a very long way, and it’s providing all this essential habitat for wildlife communities.”
Trumpeter swans are native to this area of Toronto, but the landscape beneath them at Tommy Thompson Park is not exactly natural. The city spent decades creating it from dredged earth and waste.
Tommy Thompson Park, a former construction waste dump, is an urban wilderness park that has become a model of ecological restoration.
It is also a biodiversity hotspot, with river otters, white-tailed deer, monarch butterflies and red-breasted mergansers, as well as wildflower meadows and wetlands that teem with life. It is known as one of the best spots for birdwatching in the city, with more than 300 recorded species.
Named for the city’s first commissioner of parks, the wildlife magnet sits on the Leslie Street Spit, a peninsula just minutes away from the city’s downtown core. The five-kilometre park attracts an estimated 300,000 visitors each year, most of them cyclists, walkers and birders. Many locals refer to the park as “the Spit.”
It is unique in Canada, and possibly North America, in that the land is entirely man-made; it wasn’t initially intended to be a park and it is surrounded by water. The TRCA says it isn’t aware of any other examples like this, of a rubble landform in a lake that has transformed into wilderness park.
While it was under construction in the 20th century, the Leslie Street Spit was a more forlorn-looking place. The restoration of nature would come later.
Construction of Leslie Spit began in 1959, to create a breakwater for Toronto’s harbour. Initially, it was also planned as part of an expansion of Toronto’s port capabilities, but the anticipated shipping boom never happened; for years, the spot was simply a dumping ground. Over decades, Toronto deposited sediment dredged from the lake bottom and waste from demolished buildings and subway construction, slowly creating the five-kilometre peninsula.
In 1973, the province gave the TRCA responsibility for developing a plan for a public park, and the conservation authority has been working on habitat restoration projects since 1995. Today’s park is the result of both targeted restoration efforts and natural succession. Wildlife has come on its own, says Ms. Chreston.
“Everything that’s happened at Tommy Thompson is wild and natural, but we’ve created these habitats that they’re thriving in.”
For humans, the Spit is a spot to relax away from home. For birds, like these cliff swallows, it is home.
The park was bustling with wildlife during a recent two-hour visit. A meadow vole darted across the pathway; monarchs danced amongst the milkweed, and a garter snake slithered over the path. Ms. Chreston points out nests of barn swallows and cliff swallows, bat boxes and a floating raft for common terns.
Its location, jutting out into Lake Ontario, has made it a crucial stopover point for birds and butterflies. It has received official designation as important for birds, environmentally significant and a key biodiversity area. Indeed, the park is home to animals not always expected in large cities, including painted turtles, milk snakes and largemouth bass, and mammals such as beavers, foxes, mink and coyotes.
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There have been beavers at Tommy Thompson for more than 20 years.
Its success has attracted global attention: This spring, a delegation of officials from Korea visited the park to learn how to establish plants in a site like this. “There’s definitely a lot of international interest,” as well as from places across North America, says Ms. Chreston. And in November, 2025, the TRCA won an award for the park as a model of ecological restoration and protection, presented at the Global Forum on Human Settlements in Geneva.
The TRCA is also sharing what it has learned more locally. In May, a new conservation area opened in nearby Mississauga that incorporated lessons learned from Tommy Thompson. Jim Tovey Lakeview Conservation Area is a waterfront park with restored habitat for birds, butterflies and other wildlife.
Toronto resident John Carley has been visiting the Spit since the 1980s. “Just walking out there, and being out there with water and waves and away from the city is what I love,” said Mr. Carley, who is co-chair of Friends of the Spit, a group founded in 1977 that advocates to keep the Spit as a car-free public urban wilderness.
His group has checklists of all the sightings of flora and fauna on its website – around 400 plant species, 336 species of birds, 22 kinds of mammals, more than 50 butterfly species, and more than 40 dragonfly and damselfly species.
As the light fades, visitors take their last looks and leave. The park closes to the public at 9 p.m. every day; opening hours vary through the week.
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The yellow black-eyed Susans in this meadow are native to Ontario, but many species around it are not.
Nature is, as the federal government said this year, foundational to Canadian identity. Ottawa announced a new strategy to protect the natural environment in March; among its goals is to restore degraded ecosystems.
And it’s working. The habitat is thriving and the animals have come. In the past few years, white-tail deer have begun breeding in the park. River otters too. “They’re super secretive, so it’s very difficult to find them, but that’s a species that was absent from the Toronto waterfront for a century,” said Ms. Chreston. Those trumpeter swans, native to the area and once rare, are growing in population: This is the 13th year they have nested in the park and this year a total of 16 cygnets hatched from three nests.
It’s weird, in a wonderful way. A nature park built atop rusted rebar and broken ceramic tiles, slabs of concrete and weathered bricks, gravel, stones and sand. People make spontaneous art out of the random, textured found objects along the shoreline.
Mr. Carley hopes it will remain a place that is not manicured, a little rough and largely left to its own devices. His philosophy for the park is, “as much as possible, letting nature rule.”
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Far across town from Tommy Thompson Park, birds of prey have a big job to do at Pearson airport. The Globe paid the animals a visit to see their struggle against geese, ducks and gulls that could threaten planes.
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