I live near the Toronto shoreline in an area where we’re lucky enough to have various sized parks in easy walking and biking distance. It’s always been a joy to walk around because of the openness (physically, and for one’s eyes and soul to stretch a bit), and because you never know what birds you may hear or interesting wild critter you may encounter.
This year has been exceptionally hot and muggy, even by Toronto standards. Due to the city and region being in something of a geographical basin, Toronto is probably among the world’s top places (yay!) for worst combined heat and humidity (wait… boo!). Here we get something generally referred to as a “humidex”, which I learned that, like the term “windchill” that we get in the winter, is something many people have never heard of. Windchill is how much colder our winter days feel than they actually are, due to, as the name suggests, wind. Humidex, hugely relevant these days, is kind of the opposite of that: How much hotter it feels due to, yep, humidity.
It’s not uncommon for humidex to push the apparent temperature up by several degrees (for instance, it’s maybe actually 32C/90F as far as thermometers go but feels like it’s 38C/100F). The worst I saw it get this summer was an increase of 12 degrees C thanks to humidity. It was 30C/86F but felt like 42C/108F.
Gross.
But a big humidex is doubly bad, of course because you’re not only dealing with increased heat as far as your body is concerned, but the humidity makes it harder to escape the heat. Your sweat doesn’t evaporate as quickly to cool you down. And step into a shadow all you want to if you’re outside, but it’ll barely cut how hot it feels because so much of the heat you’re feeling is how humid it is, and humidity doesn’t care much about shadows. It can easily become dangerous.
And I’m no scientist — I don’t even play one on TV — but I think that the exceptionally hot summer has had some effect on certain critters being more active and way more populous.
We’ve been in our house for about 18 years, and we’ve never seen so many rabbits around. Wild hares, specifically. I’ve seen a ton more rabbits this summer than I have in all our years here collectively. And they continue to flourish. Saw another one yesterday, just hanging out on a neighbour’s lawn munching on clover and being cute. Friends in the area have commented on how many they’ve been seeing, as well. It seems like we have exponentially more rabbits, which is saying something for an animal already known for its rapid population growth.
Also way more active are skunks.
Oh, man, the skunks.
We and neighbours have seen and smelled them way more often than usual, even for summer. Our dog got sprayed by a young one a couple of weeks back, in our own small back yard, despite going to lengths to seal the place in against critters anywhere near that size.
And this is now I think our third summer in the home since its overhaul reno, yet just a few weeks back we noticed that wasps have built (growing) nests in two outdoor peaks of the roof, as well as a tiny one — I think it’s different, though, maybe more mud daubers than paper wasps — in the upper corner of our side door frame. Again, one wonders why that (or at least the big ones, the tiny one in the side door exterior is a repeat) has never happened before but is suddenly happening this year. And again, I suspect it’s the crazy heat we’ve had.
And it occurs to me that with climate change being a clear thing, that this may not only be an exceptional year for Toronto. It could become our new annual norm.
All of which just lends itself to a growing list of issues making me ask myself how long we’re going to continue to live in the city. But that’s for another post.