There are deer tracks underfoot. An egret, sensing intruders, spreads its impressive wings and lifts off a nearby perch to glide elegantly downstream. Mallards paddle above the gurgling rapids as the early morning sun peeks through the trees.

It is unexpectedly idyllic.

We are on the west bank of the Don River, just north of Pottery Rd. Not as far south as where the water’s flow, tamed and straightened by retaining walls, passes under a tangle of concrete roadways, but in the heart of the city nonetheless.

However, if not for the hum of commuters along the Don Valley Parkway, you could imagine this a pastoral hideaway.

David Clark has brought us here, through chest-high underbrush to the river’s edge where he now busily prepares his gear, tying a hook to the eight-pound test line of his spinning reel. Clark, co-founder of Toronto Urban Fishing Ambassadors, wants to demonstrate that the Don, still regarded by many as a toxic cesspool, is actually an undervalued recreational resource.

“The Don is an overlooked river,” he says, neatly summing up Toronto’s relationship with the oft-ignored waterway. “But I can be here catching fish while people are stuck in traffic not too far away.”

Many of the car-bound would be surprised at what lurks in these tepid waters.

In the spring, white suckers run in the Don. There are some rainbow trout then as well. In the fall, chinook salmon battle their way upstream looking for a place to spawn. Most common are fish that can tolerate the river’s almost bath-like temperatures and high pollution counts, such as creek chub and blacknose dace. Those minnow-sized species serve as perfect meals for larger predators such as pike and walleye that are returning in greater numbers. Twenty-five species call the Don home.

But we are in one of those stifling hot stretches that have defined the summer and made the shallow Don even warmer. So we are here at 6 a.m. Not much point in trying when the sun is higher, says Clark. As it is, most fish have headed for the deeper, cooler waters beyond Keating Channel — where the 38-kilometre Don ends in the shadow of the Gardiner Expressway with a dramatic turn west — to Toronto’s inner harbour or the lake. Still, Clark believes we’ll find carp, suckers and bullheads — fish that can handle the low oxygen levels the warmth brings.

Clark, 49, starts out with a small piece of worm as bait. On his fifth cast he gets a bite, as he does on his next couple of tries. While that’s encouraging, he figures the fish showing interest, likely suckers, are too small to hook and decides to move farther up the river.

The water, undoubtedly less murky than when it served as Toronto’s all-purpose repository, is reasonably clear with no obvious odour, but its appearance is a tad deceiving. The city, on its 311 website, cautions it “is not advisable to swim in the Don” especially after a rainstorm, when elevated E. coli levels “can make you very sick … if you should inadvertently fall into the Don, it would be wise to wash thoroughly with antibacterial soap as soon as possible.”

But Rick Portiss, a senior manager and fish specialist with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), says the water has improved greatly over the last four decades. “If this was a completely degraded, polluted system, these fish wouldn’t be drawn to this system at all,” he says.

The city of Toronto is working with several stakeholders such as Parks, Forestry and Recreation and the TRCA to develop a Toronto Ravine Strategy that will provide a framework for future ravine policy and use, including recreation.

Portiss says he “absolutely” encourages people to fish in the Don as a way to connect to the river and, in turn, feel engaged in the watershed’s future.

“Where else in the country,” he wonders, “can you take a streetcar down to your favourite fishing holes?”

Back on the river’s edge, Clark eyes a half-dozen good-sized carp in deeper water. He opens a can of corn, a favourite of these foragers, and tosses a handful of kernels into the water to pique their interest.

He then baits his hook and casts, hoping for a nibble on his niblets. These seen-it-all urban fish likely aren’t much different than their nearby human counterparts battling traffic. They appear a little jaded and disengaged.

“Urban fishing isn’t easy. It takes some time,” he says. “Fish here have seen presentations of bait and lures, especially the larger pike and carp that are 15 to 20 years old. Those larger fish were likely caught on a lure when they were younger, so they know to be cautious.”

Still, it is not long before Clark has hooked the lip of a large carp. It takes less than a minute to land it. The faster he brings it in, the better for the fish when released — as it is for this one, after puckering up for a close-up.

Clark has never eaten anything he has caught in the Don but, he says, that’s only because he’s never fought a fish to the point where it was mortally wounded or likely too exhausted to live. He says he has seen others keep suckers they have caught.

Surprisingly, fish from the river are edible.

The current Guide to Eating Ontario Fish, published by the provincial government, does allow for limited consumption of white sucker and brown bullheads taken from the Pottery Rd. area of the Don. Other species have not been tested. Toxins restricting consumption are mercury and PCBs, a poisonous organic compound once widely used in industry.

“People are probably doubtful that there are fish in here, but that’s one of the almost nice things about it,” says Clark, whose biggest haul from the Don was a 23-pound carp.

“There’s not a lot of fishing pressure on the river; you have a longer stretch of river to fish in solitude.”

A river returns to life

Some 200 years ago, inmates of the Don Jail complained that they were eating too much fresh salmon. It was an easy meal. Guards could just wander over to the Don River to quickly catch enough Atlantic salmon for all their incarcerated guests.

But industrialization and urbanization grew in the Don watershed. That meant effluent from paper mills, chemical factories, refineries, abattoirs and tanneries mixed with agricultural animal waste, and sometimes animal carcasses, to make the river a slow-moving toxic soup that destroyed spawning grounds. Native salmon disappeared, the last recorded one plucked from the river in 1874 near Pottery Rd.

The river was so horribly polluted — it reportedly caught fire twice and was known to change colour based on the chemicals used by a paper mill — that Pollution Probe ceremonially pronounced it dead in 1969.

“They finally had a funeral for the Don River yesterday,” read a report in the Toronto Telegram. “Judging from the smell of the ‘deceased,’ it was long overdue.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Even now, when passersby see David Clark fishing in its waters, they make the usual cracks about snagging a three-eyed monster or offer dire warnings against eating what he catches.

Ralph Toninger, a senior manager with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, says public perception and the stigma surrounding the river are obstacles in getting people to use the Don for recreation.

“It’s an underutilized fishery,” he says. “The biggest thing we have to fight is (the belief) that if you dip your toe in it, it’s going to fall off. The water quality has already improved significantly and we have wildlife using these areas.”

Still, a 2013 TRCA report card on the Don River watershed gave the water a “very poor” rating of F. “The main reason,” states the report, “is that 96 per cent of the watershed is urbanized, largely built up and paved over.”

All that pavement means rainwater and melting snow carry contaminants directly into the river. About 1.2 million people call Canada’s most urbanized watershed home.

The F grade is the result of, among other things, phosphorus and E. coli concentrations. High levels of phosphorus can cause the growth of algae that choke waterways and deplete oxygen levels. E. coli indicates the presence of untreated human or animal waste.

The report states the water has not changed substantially since 2001, though phosphorus levels at the mouth of the Don have declined significantly over the last 30 years.

Still, tighter restrictions on contaminants and the use of herbicides and pesticides, as well as the banning of leaded gas — a significant development for a river so close to the Don Valley Parkway — have resulted in substantial improvements since the 1950s and ’60s, says Toninger.

And the TRCA and local city and regional governments have been working to improve the river and its watershed — examples include the construction of a stormwater management pond in Earl Bales Park on the West Don, the development of three wetlands in the East Don Parklands area and the planting of trees and shrubs.

When Clark arrived in Toronto from Peterborough in 1985, his first impressions of the Don were formed by where it is most visible: the walled-in waterway near Richmond St.

“A river you’d never fish in,” he says.

But when he learned the Humber and Credit rivers had runs of rainbow trout and salmon, he became curious about the Don. It took him about a decade before he dropped a line in it.

“Once we started catching suckers, we knew it was worth exploring more,” he says. “The next year I was seeing pike that were 30-plus inches long.”

Portiss, the TRCA fish expert, notes several examples of how the Don is bouncing back from its dirtiest days.

Rainbow trout, what he calls a “highly sensitive fish,” are returning to the river’s headwaters in the Oak Ridges Moraine. There was an Atlantic salmon, a species reintroduced in the more pristine waters of Duffins Creek and the Credit River, caught exploring the Keating Channel area. And walleye, which virtually disappeared 25 years ago, are now “prolific” through the Don system.

That predators like walleye and pike are in the river means there is also a thriving ecosystem in place to keep them fed.

Portiss says the TRCA often tests both the water and sediment that is frequently dredged from Keating Channel, and “the contamination that we used to see 25 years ago has completely dwindled down to just traces that we see now. It’s a huge change.”

The TRCA has removed or altered barriers so fish can pass freely in the Don, but sport fishing in the river, inner harbour and along the lakefront should improve even more with a planned but still unfunded realignment and naturalization of the Don estuary, with its associated wetlands, estimated to cost almost $1 billion. In July 2015, the three levels of government, with Waterfront Toronto, announced $5 million in funding for due diligence work to provide certainty on the costs.

“If you were to stop 10 people on the Gardiner Expressway and ask them if they thought there was fish in the Don River, nine out of 10 are going to say no,” says Portiss.

“But there’s a good diversity of fish species there that are right under their noses at the Gardiner Expressway.”

Read more about: