Nearly 100 residents showed up to help rebuild Brantford’s Bird Path on Sunday, January 5, 2025.
Chris Wilson and his daughter Taylor first began walking the trail every morning back in 2020 after she was sent home from college due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Taylor’s an avid bird watcher so we started coming down here because we’re only a kilometre away; we were birdwatching everyday and the trail just started to make itself so I thought, ‘well, I might as well just make it into a real trail,’” he said. “We wanted to have some markers along the way and so instead of using paint we figured, ‘why don’t we just use bird houses since that’s what we’re using it for’ and it just grew from there.”
As the bird path began taking off, Chris also started building unpainted birdhouses and leaving them there for other residents to take home to paint and place them along the trail and after four years, the path featured around 150 birdhouses.
That was until December 8, 2024, when he noticed that there were three of them laying damaged on the path.
“I came down and there were about three bird houses here at the beginning that were just destroyed so I took them home and started to fix them. When I brought them back the next day, I noticed there were three more broken,” recalled Chris. “Again, I took them home to fix them and when I came back the next day, there was a gentleman who walks the trail everyday and I found him cleaning up even more. We decided to walk the whole trail and for two kilometres there were just destroyed birdhouses everywhere.”
Chris said that out of the nearly 150 birdhouses along the path, they discovered that about 110 of them were either damaged or torn down.
“We know it was done with a hockey stick because the last spot, about two kilometers in where they stopped, they left about a foot of the stick stuck inside the last birdhouse they destroyed,” he said. “It was just disappointing to see because a lot of people use the trail now and it’s really become a community project that people enjoy.”
After the news of the damage hit social media, residents quickly began weighing in and expressing their shock and disappointment in the vandalism, and while police and neighbourhood schools have been made aware of the damage, whoever did it has yet to come forward.
Despite the disappointment, the Wilson family took to social media on December 11 to announce that they would be hosting an event to repair the bird trail in the new year.
Taylor’s post on Facebook asked community members to either build, buy or paint a birdhouse and meet at the trail to replace what was lost, and on the day, the community did just that.
Around 100 people attended the event and spent the afternoon hanging birdhouses, walking the path to admire it and chatting with fellow residents.
Jenna Stevens, who lives close by to the trail, said she loves the bird path and was disappointed when she heard the news. She said that despite how unfortunate the whole situation is, she was pleasantly surprised to see how many community members came out to help rebuild the path.
“This trail isn’t overly popular compared to others in the area so I’m surprised with how many have come out, but it’s just really so nice to see the community get together like this,” she said.
Stevens added that with so many new people having discovered the path over the past month, she hopes that it will inspire residents to help keep other parts of the trail clean as well.
“If the community is coming out today and we’re working together to make this a beautiful spot again, then I hope they’ll also be kind of motivated to help pick up the trash along the back of the trail,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because it’s close to the landfill or what, but there’s always a bunch of trash near the back there and it’s just so sad to see, especially with the river so close by.”
Herself and other residents all noted that when they walk the path, they often bring a garbage bag along to help pick up the large pieces of garbage.
Peter Stones, another Brantford resident who frequents the path and who helped Chris to rebuild whatever birdhouses they could, said he was looking forward to seeing how everything would turn out.
“Chris has done a wonderful job spearheading this and I can’t help but think of this as the bird path 2.0 because now it’s going to just be twice as great as it was, you know?”
Overall, Chris said it was unbelievable to see how many people came out and that he was thankful for everyone’s support.
“This is what I do for a hobby and so to see this many people show up and put up their own birdhouses is just amazing, I can’t thank everyone enough,” he said. “This just melts my heart and I can’t wait to walk the trail and see what it looks like when it’s done.”
And as it turns out, Stones wasn’t overexaggerating when he said it would be twice as great; later that day, Taylor announced on Facebook that while they discovered one of their new trail cameras had been torn down, the bird path now features over 300 birdhouses along the trail, double what was already there in the first place.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
