With National Volunteer Week now underway, it’s an ideal time to reflect on the role people play in protecting Ontario’s biodiversity. Community science is one meaningful way to get involved. And as spring returns to Ontario, pollinators begin to reappear in fields, forests, wetlands, and gardens making them a natural group of species to observe for community science programs.

While these sightings may feel routine, they are becoming less predictable for many species. Pollinator populations are declining due to habitat loss, pesticide exposure (especially neonicotinoids), disease, invasive species, and climate change. These threats are reshaping where species can survive and fragmenting habitats that once supported stable populations. Getting involved as a volunteer observer is one of the most direct ways to support pollinator conservation in Ontario.

Why Pollinator Sightings Matter

Pollinators — such as bees, butterflies, moths, and even birds — are important indicators of ecosystem health. They support plant reproduction and help sustain food webs across the province and country. Because many species depend on specific plants or habitats, even small environmental changes can have significant impacts.

This also makes pollinators especially valuable for community science. Each observation helps researchers track biodiversity changes across Ontario over time.

Pollinators at Risk in Ontario

Under the Endangered Species Act, 2007, many species at risk received legal protection. However, Ontario’s new Species Conservation Act, 2025, introduced through Bill 5, changes how species are protected and may reduce protections for some, including certain pollinators.

Monarch (Endangered in Canada / Special Concern in Ontario)

Herbicides and insecticides reduce milkweed, a crucial piece of the Monarch’s breeding habitat. Their long-distance migration also exposes them to threats such as habitat loss and declining wildflower availability.

Rusty-patched Bumble Bee (Endangered)

Once common in southern Ontario, this species has declined sharply. The last confirmed observation records in Canada come from two Ontario Parks, Pinery Provincial Park (2009) and St. Williams Conservation Reserve (2000).

Mottled Duskywing (Endangered)

This butterfly depends on rare oak woodlands and plants such as the New Jersey Tea and Prairie Redroot. These habitats are limited and fragmented, making populations vulnerable.

West Virginia White (Special Concern)

An early spring butterfly that depends on Two-leaved Toothwort. Invasive garlic mustard is a threat to this species as it disrupts egg laying behaviour.

Yellow-banded Bumble Bee (Special Concern)

An early spring pollinator of wild plants and crops such as blueberries and apples. This bumble bee’s abundance has decreased in Ontario and is associated with habitat loss, pesticide exposure, climate change, and disease.

Contribute your Sightings

If you spot these or other species, you can contribute to community science projects:

• Butterflies and moths can be recorded through the Ontario Butterfly Atlas and the Butterflies in My Backyard project
• Bumble bees can be reported via Bumble Bee Watch
• Birds via Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas
• Reptiles and Amphibians via Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas

You can also join the global community of iNaturalist users to share and verify observations. The Natural Heritage Information Centre has a Rare Species of Ontario project.

The Ethics of Observation

Observe wildlife responsibly to avoid disturbance and ensure useful data. Follow A Nature Viewer’s Code of Ethics and be aware that many species are protected under Ontario’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act and Canada’s Species at Risk Act.

Every observation matters. Whether you notice pollinators in your garden, birds overhead, or frogs in a wetland, your sightings contribute to a better understanding of Ontario’s ecosystems—and how they are changing.

Will S. posted a photo:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehern

Hamilton, Ontario.

Bill 73, Protecting Ontario from Urban Wildfires Act, was introduced to the Ontario legislature in 2025 and marks an important step to raising the profile of urban wildfire risk awareness and action. People working in conservation, landscaping, and gardening groups need to help our neighbours understand the risks of urban wildfires and take the right protective steps. Ontarians need to urge municipal and provincial lawmakers as well as civil servants to provide frameworks and revise rules to help us in this important climate mitigation task.

What’s the risk? Briefly, that in the next decade climate warming-driven wildfires like the ones that devastated parts of Jasper, Fort McMurray, Lytton, and many other towns will burn further south during droughts and heatwaves. As temperatures rise, urban wildfire risk in Ontario communities will increase.

I’m an adjunct professor in biology at York University. I speak often with gardening and landscaping groups about wildfire prevention in homes. For the last few years, I’ve been warning these audiences that we need to adopt best in class practices for urban fire risk reduction. Of course, many of these practices are building-related and involve improving fences, siding, roofing, and eaves. But reducing the frequent use of higher flammability evergreens and other foundation plantings must be on our list.

Fire-Resistant Native Plants for Ontario Homes

Evergreen conifers and tall grasses are commonly used near homes. Ontario does have a page on “FireSmart landscaping” but many (most) groups I speak to aren’t aware of the facts it lays out. The page has a good list of fire-resistant native plants for Ontario that can be used closer to homes – none are evergreen.

FireSmart suggests better fire-resistant native plants for Ontario homes include:

• Nannyberry
• Ninebark
• Wintergreen as a groundcover
• Bearberry between shrubs

Native grasses are elegant additions to landscaping but need to be kept away from houses. The worst-case scenario is a moist spring with luxuriant growth followed by dry summer and fall days. That’s what happened in the scrublands around Marshall Colorado in 2021. A high-speed wind system fanned an incredibly fast-moving grass fire front towards a subdivision. 37,500 residents evacuated resulting in two deaths and 1,084 buildings burned with estimated damage at US$2 billion.

The FireSmart concept of the “Home Ignition Zone” (HIZ) is the “100-200 feet around the home”. Typically, this would include several properties in many of Ontario’s downtown areas. My downtown lot is considered wide at 30 feet; defining an HIZ for my property would mean including two or three adjoining houses on each side. Several of them have large conifers right next to the house.

Action at the provincial and municipal levels will be needed to remedy this. Toronto, for example, has many blue spruces or cedars that were planted as “nice” four-to-five-foot trees in yards. They have since grown to three or four stories tall and brush against houses. A paper on Toronto’s tree inventory said eastern white cedar is one of our most common trees.

In fact, FireSmart guidance from Kamloops Fire Rescue identifies cedar hedges as highly flammable due to their combustible oils, dense foliage and tendency to accumulate dry material. Yet to cut down one of these trees requires a costly permit from the city.

I’m conflicted on this. Many of our birds love dense evergreens as safe places to nest. But I suggest we start a 10-year program of removing flammable landscaping near our homes and replacing with less flammable native shrubs. We should also help our nurseries and landscapers build up lists and inventories of low flammability natives.

Money talks. Politicians should be aware that many of the most expensive properties in Toronto are adjacent to ravines and thus at higher risk because fire spreads rapidly uphill. Those property owners could be a force in moving action forward if they were aware of the risks.

Please raise awareness of this bill, of the FireSmart information and of the need for landscapers and homeowners to change planting practices.

At a friend’s cottage I recently uncovered a copy of The Reptiles of Ontario published in 1939 by the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology. It’s an artifact that thrills with the mention of the extraordinary nature once found near human settlement.

It says that, in 1877, a timber rattlesnake, a species now extirpated from Ontario, was discovered a mile from Niagara Falls and even into the late 1930s this large snake—which can be five feet or longer—was found at Niagara Glen.

The spiny soft-shelled turtle, now endangered, once occurred in Hamilton Bay. The spotted turtle, also endangered, was in the 1930s common around Lake Erie. The eastern hog-nosed snake, currently threatened, was in 1907 found in Toronto.

The book’s most uplifting section is devoted to the Massasauga rattlesnake. The author, E.B.S. Logier, offers it a measure of empathy. In fact, he hints that it has intrinsic value.

This is extraordinary given that it’s long been reviled in the province. From the time of early settlement on, many considered it dangerous. Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, wrote in her diary in the 1790s that 700 rattlesnakes were killed during the building of a mill on the Humber River.

Logier laments that the creature is rarely seen and adds, “There will be multitudes of serious-minded people in the generations yet to come who will wish to see and study rattlesnakes…so there is a responsibility incumbent on us who are living today, and who by the very nature of the case are trustees of an estate to be passed on, not to wantonly destroy any living thing, regardless of whether from our point of view it is a desirable creature or not.”

Logier says we should protect rattlers because it would benefit humans: future Ontarians may want to experience them. But by urging their preservation even if they aren’t desirable ‘from our point of view’ he also suggests wildlife has inherent worth. It’s his use of ‘our point of view’ — coming decades before the modern environmental movement — that’s impressive here.

Further, in calling us “trustees of an estate”, he implies our job is not to exploit the natural world but to safeguard it. This echoes the message and conservation work of Ontario Nature, which reminds us that the environment is entrusted to us for future generations, not as something to own, but as something to steward.

Logier isn’t ready to grant the Massasauga constitutional rights (what might be called “security of the serpent”), but he’s gesturing in that direction.

And given he was writing 87 years ago, that’s admirable.