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The gusts of cold wind die down after you slip through a hole that trespassers have made in the mangled chain-link fence behind a Notre-Dame-de-Grâce bowling alley.

Leaving the desolate, ice-encrusted Rose Bowl parking lot behind, you’re embraced by an unexpectedly warm urban forest — a microclimate favoured by as many as 65 species of birds, with tracks indicating raccoons (and maybe even deer and foxes or coyotes) like to visit, too.

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Lisa Mintz is leading a tour of the urban oasis that she has taken under wing.

We’re on the falaise St-Jacques — a forested, four-kilometre escarpment between the Turcot Interchange and Montreal West. Some call it the lungs of N.D.G.

“It’s a little pocket of wilderness in the middle of a concrete jungle and it is like the last stand of green spaces,” Mintz said. “It symbolizes what we have done to green space everywhere — put them into smaller and smaller boxes.”