The relationship between the city’s sprawling urban landscape and its wildlife is the focus of a brand new exhibition at the Museum of Toronto.
Toronto is North America’s fourth largest city, a distinct, ever-expanding metropolis occupying the shores of Lake Ontario, and it’s easy to forget while navigating its infinite, graffiti-clad alleys, that among the chaos of honking horns, wailing sirens and clattering street car tracks exists a flourishing network of wildlife.
The exhibit, entitled, Toronto Gone Wild, begins by exploring the realm of a common but wrongly labelled enemy; the racoon. Often branded as a perpetual nuisance, racoons are in fact smart, adaptable and most impressively, able to open bins designed to keep them away from our uneaten scraps.
“Racoons are very much like humans,” Amy Lavender Harris, co-curator, author, urbanist and Geographer, told Now Toronto. “They’re extremely intelligent,” she said.
Part of the exhibit explores the ways in which their species’ relationship with us is changing, why people make raccoons’ lives miserable, but also how humans and raccoons can peacefully accommodate each other’s existence.
Raccoons help keep our city clean, added historian, professor and co-curator Jennifer Bonnell. They’re scavengers, like wasps and pigeons, she explained.
“The animals we really want to hate in the city are actually really important in terms of being the city’s janitors,” Bonnell continued.
The exhibit goes on to explore a multitude of urban habitats and behaviours, from the imperative existence of bees, to the fascinating lives of urban dwelling coyotes, the enduring presence of plants and the animated world of creatures along the lake.
Almost all urban flora and fauna perform ecosystem services whose input we may not appreciate day-to-day, Harris said, but if they were gone, she said we would certainly notice their absence.
“Things would be out of balance, that goes for coyotes, raccoons, squirrels, they all exist in this negotiation over space.”
Toronto Gone Wild is on at the Museum of Toronto until August 3. Admission is free.
For more information, check out the museum’s website.
