Fishing and wildlife in new Windermere Park threatened by illegal dumping

scotto

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Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator
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Jan 18, 2016

MAHONEY: Fishing and wildlife in new Windermere Park threatened by illegal dumping


Jim Howlett is walking on what used to be water (disgusting water — the notorious Windermere Basin, but water nonetheless), at Windermere Basin Park.

But don't get the wrong idea. He only wishes he could perform miracles. If he could, he's wish away the illegal dumping. It would be easier than cleaning it up himself.

He doesn't do it anymore — it became too hard to keep up with, and too costly — but for a time he was shovelling construction debris out of the Winderemere Basin Park and bringing it by the ton and paying the fee at the waste station.

I stood out with Jim and his friend Lydia Cartlidge Sunday in the park and discovered a microculture in this city that I never suspected could exist. No swings and sandboxes here — it's not that kind of a park — but rather manufactured coyote dens (to bring down bird overpopulation), marsh growth, a beaver lodge, carp barriers, swallow colonies, and an air quality monitor.

The wind, frigid and forbidding, sheared across the infill wetlands into which the old Windermere Basin has been transformed.

"I've been here in a lot colder, sometimes two in the morning walking the dog, and there's always someone here, someone fishing," says Jim, lifelong beach resident and former chair of the Hamilton Conservation Authority.

The park entrance is just off Eastport, past Pier 25 South, and almost impossible to spot unless you're told exactly where it is.

A few hundreds yard down and across the thoroughfare is a kind of satellite campus for fishing, by the hydro tower underneath the Burlington Street exit from the QEW. It's "the most popular carp fishing spot maybe the province," says Ward 5 Councillor Chad Collins. "We get people from all over."

It's not just carp. Jim has pulled rainbow trout and pike out of these waters.

Because the property around here is a kind of "no man's land," part city-owned, hydro, highway, no one has taken charge of managing it, say both Chad and Jim.

So, sadly and increasingly in the last two or thee years, illegal dumping has arrived, mostly construction material, says Jim.

"I've found shingles, insulation, brick, stone," says Jim. Lydia brought something to him. It looks like a pill bottle — the label says Ephedrine. Over at the fishing mecca by the tower, more and worse. Roofing material scattered everywhere. The ground has been dug up over large stretches by truck wheels.

If the words "Windermere Basin Park" still jangle in the Hamilton ear — wasn't Windermere Basin basically a swimming pool for the Toxic Avenger, rather than a park? — it's because so few know it.

But it's part of an amazing reversal of fortune in the east end. Under the shadows of the QEW and the looming factories and by the city sewage plant, there's new habitat for wildlife and a developing wetlands ecosystem of which the fishers are a respectful part. It's a tribute to the $20 million Windermere Basin reclamation project completed in 2012, marked by the park opening.

The fishers have always been here but more recently they've put up garbage cans, picnic benches, even the seat from a van. There's little littering. But there's dumping and it's threatening the future here.

Jim is imploring the city, and/or the other stakeholders, to do something about it before someone decides to shut everything down.

Says Chad, "We (city hall) have just formalized illegal dumping bylaw enforcement teams. We're cracking down on illegal dumping." Cameras could be an option.

He's also realistic. "It's a cat-and-mouse game." Sometimes it's cheaper to clean up violations than to spend time and money over-monitoring.

The tricky part is that the wetland and creek areas are not residential or commercial, so there's not the built-in surveillance.

"The good thing is that (as the areas become more popular) there's always someone there (fishing or walking dogs) and that's a deterrent."

Let's hope so. It's a hidden treasure in our midst.



jmahoney@thespec.com

905-526-3306
http://www.thespec.com/news-story/6...indermere-park-threatened-by-illegal-dumping/
 
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