Watching over Hunt Club Creek
It's like a scene out of backwoods Canada: a clear, cool, fast-moving brook tumbles down a tiered waterfall in picturesque stages; a mixed forest, alive with darting insects and trilling songbirds, crowds each side of the shaded ravine; a semi-submerged frog peeks out from a weedy, slack-water pool; a raccoon's paw prints, inscribed perfectly in the muddy shore, attest to a recent visit to drink, wash or hunt; and a grackle scouts for crayfish from a creekside stone, its occasional screeches punctuating the background burble.
For a few seconds, it's possible to imagine this moment unfolding in a remote, pristine wilderness, perhaps in a documentary voiced by Sir David Attenborough — all hushed wonderment at the sight of nature doing its thing.
In fact, this is nothing so exotic. We're directly below a graffitied rail bridge spanning the Rideau River, a short stroll from a highrise apartment complex near one of Ottawa's busiest suburban arterials, Riverside Drive, and within earshot (evidently) of a fire or ambulance station.
A camera pan left or right would bring a discarded Tim Hortons cup, a windblown Doritos bag or even a junked car tire — maddening, but true — into the filmmaker's frame.
Still, there's beauty here at the outlet of Hunt Club Creek, and inklings of a functioning, resilient little ecosystem amid the litter, sirens and other trappings of urban life.
And we can thank John Sankey — retired scientist, avid nature lover and the creek's founding “stream watcher” — for spearheading the ongoing transformation of a stinky stormwater drainage ditch into a tiny but respectable tributary of the Rideau.
“I took it on partly to prevent it from getting any worse,” says Sankey, recalling how he “adopted” the bedraggled creek when he moved to the south-end Hunt Club area following a long career as a physicist with the National Research Council.
“I'm a scientist,” he adds. “I'm fascinated by just about anything. That's really it. If you're curious about things — well, that's what I am. I'll take in absolutely anything in this world that's beautiful ... I'm always drawn to natural places.”
Already very active in his new neighbourhood as president of the Hunt Club Community Association, about 10 years ago Sankey decided to become the creek's chief protector, promoter and biographer.
First, he forged a partnership between the HCCA and the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority to conduct the first full-scale study of the creek's water quality, flow dynamics, shoreline characteristics, resident plant and animal species and much more.
The Rideau's tributaries are key to the watershed's overall health, and parks and pathways along them are vital recreational amenities for many communities. Hunt Club Creek is the smallest of the river's feeder streams within the city of Ottawa, but its water quality has always been a concern for officials monitoring downstream activities, such as public swimming at Mooney's Bay.
In the 1970s, environmentalists and scientists successfully fought a city proposal to dump massive volumes of chlorine directly into the creek to reduce contamination in the Rideau. In the face of objections from Pollution Probe and other groups to a plan to pump the chemical disinfectant directly into Rideau at Mooney's Bay, proponents suggested Hunt Club Creek “be used for the city's first chlorination experiment rather than an important river,” the Ottawa Journal reported.
A more holistic view of river systems, one acknowledging the interconnectedness of all streams, big and small, in aquatic ecosystems has since prevailed.
The 2013 study highlighted the fragility of the creek's ecological health as it winds its way for more than three kilometres through a heavily developed stretch of the city. But it also provided new baseline measurements to track progress in curbing pollution and improving wildlife habitat.
And it documented how portions of the stream valley, however degraded, were already being used by a surprising number of species, including blue and green herons; mallard and black ducks; muskrats and raccoons; three varieties of frogs; red-winged blackbirds, warblers and other songbirds; pollinators such as bumblebees; and a single variety of fish: the brook stickleback — likely introduced to the creek as eggs stuck to a duck's feathers.
Just as important as those findings, the study brought together a team of conservation experts and community volunteers in newfound appreciation of the creek — and Sankey became its first official “stream watcher” under a city-wide, RVCA-led monitoring program.
He held the post until last year: “I was the one who shoved the association into taking it on. I'm just over 80, and now I'm starting to pass things on to others.”
The creek is a work in progress, he admits, but it has gained greater attention in recent years as a valued community asset.
Sankey has also researched and written a detailed history and descriptive portrait of the creek, gathering information from old maps and archived aerial photographs, as well as documents like the 2013 report and previous studies about the Hunt Club area.
Beginning its journey to the Rideau as piped stormwater from the Ottawa airport and Department of National Defence lands south of Hunt Club Road, the creek is first visible when it spills inauspiciously from a culvert into an arrow-straight, half-kilometre-long ditch north of DeNiverville Road at former CFB Uplands.
For thousands of years, various rivulets of run-off made their way westward from the area's elevated “uplands” to the Rideau River below. But with built-up and paved-over ground in the modern city unable to absorb much precipitation, a substantial volume of fast-moving meltwater and rainfall now collects in DND's artificial channel and is fed by other storm sewers as the creek runs north and west through the Hunt Club community.
Sankey says one marshy stretch of the creek — a biodiverse wetland with a good range of riparian vegetation — has been “superbly” managed by the Hunt Club golf course, earning it coveted Audubon certification for sustainable landscape design.
But then the creek disappears again for hundreds of metres beneath a 1980s-era housing development.
“Oh, a stream — useless — put it underground!” says Sankey, mocking the attitude of planners and developers at the time. “It was totally dismissive.”
The creek re-emerges in a V-shaped, wooded corridor that begins at a spot just down the street from Sankey's home on Uplands Drive, where a plaque pays tribute to the stream and its surrounds as an important link in the city's greenway system.
The creek carries along through residential areas, lined by a popular walking path, to a control dam where much of the flow is diverted to a city-built settling pond near Riverside Drive. The pond, in turn, feeds cleaner water back into the creek just before it flows west beneath the road.
On the other side, a naturalized cattail marsh maintained by the NCC supports a range of aquatic wildlife (a beaver, controversially, was evicted a few years ago) and further filters the creek before its final, 140-metre run down what's formally known as a “mountain cataract” — hardly the kind of natural feature one expects to find a stone's throw from the Riverside Esso. The 15-metre drop to the creek's confluence with the Rideau is highlighted by the scenic cascade where a grackle hunts and a frog hides.
Published on the community association's website, Sankey's probe of the creek's past included an intriguing passage about the confusing array of names used to designate it over the decades.
“Until about 1985, the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton called our waterway Uplands Creek,” Sankey noted. “The ditch south of Hunt Club Road is internally called the DeNiverville Drain by the military, and some refer to the portion along the east edge of the golf course as the Dowler ditch (there were many Dowlers who farmed in the area).”
Sankey took matters into his own hands again to clarify the situation and gain proper recognition for the stream. Backed by the community, he petitioned the Ontario Geographic Names Board; by late 2014, he'd officially put “Hunt Club Creek” on the map.
In March, amid plans to rename Uplands Park down the street from where Sankey lives, River Coun. Riley Brockington noted in his monthly newsletter that a citizens' committee favoured the idea of honouring a worthy woman with strong local connections. But the working group “also acknowledged the multiple contributions to the local community by John Sankey,” the councillor reported, “and believes a commemorative naming in his honour is warranted.”
The idea remains under consideration, but it might require some arm-twisting to get Sankey himself to agree to such a tribute.
“I hate the idea of naming bridges and things after people,” he says, insisting that simple geographic descriptors — like Hunt Club Creek — are typically best.
Sankey's fascination with the natural world plays out in the backyard garden that he and his wife, Lynette Joseph-Sankey, lovingly tend. She grows strawberries and other fruit; among other activities, he records insect varieties — “we've had five species of ants” — and uses a motion-sensitive, night-vision camera to capture images of nocturnal visitors such as raccoons and skunks.
The creek, he says, has helped connect him to wider range of plants and animals — but also to his Hunt Club neighbours: “It's about community.”